I’m on my way to Saint Augustine, Florida. First time visiting.
Before I became a restored Christian, Saint Augustine’s writings and letters helped aesthetically reorient my faith into the structural presence of high ordered worship, his unique style and highly evocative writing register becoming something I returned to before I entirely understood the nature of its influence, or why the language seemed able to gather the disorder of an interior life into an arrangement where the disorder could remain visible while some greater presence began moving through it, and over time I became more inspired and vivified by what I felt were the resonating influences of the Holy Spirit’s transformation of my will, its immediate reception to serve the cosmic Architect, to relinquish or offload high cost local agency and position itself within its resonant vessel, the mind that sought it out, and done well to abide in nature toward the fundamental and divine principles that necessitate compliance toward its authority in an act of lived reverence.
Something in Augustine’s language had already submitted itself.
The sentence could move through memory while memory was still trying to protect its arrangement of the past. It could enter confession through the particular style of a mind turning around inside its own thought and finding God nearer to the center than the self that believed it had arrived there first. I felt the architecture before I understood its dimensions. The writing carried height. Its inwardness kept opening into a scale beyond the private condition it examined, and this gave the private condition somewhere to go once it had exhausted its own explanation.
High cost local agency.
The amount of interior force spent maintaining the mind as its own origin, keeping authority close enough to be revised by appetite, making each movement answerable to a system whose laws were being generated by the same will that wanted permission to move. At some point the cost of this becomes embedded within identity. Exhaustion begins speaking as freedom. Isolation develops an intellectual defense. The local self keeps expanding its jurisdiction because any limit arriving from outside its preferred arrangement feels like an injury, though beneath the injury another recognition has begun, quiet and difficult to admit, that a will forced to authorize the whole field of its existence will eventually consume itself in the act of permission.
The Holy Spirit’s transformation reaches this expenditure. I experience its influence as a changing receptivity inside the will, where authority can enter without first being reduced to an instrument of the self, and where obedience carries a resonance that the earlier mind could only interpret as loss. The vessel begins to matter. What it holds changes the meaning of its limits. A mind formed to receive God discovers the shape of its freedom somewhere inside that reception, and the offloading occurs gradually, through attention, through the weakening of certain inner contracts whose language had once sounded permanent.
To abide in nature toward the fundamental becomes another kind of reading. The created environment is already practicing its relation to law. The body participates before the mind has assembled its position. Hunger, sleep, gravity, breath, the return of light. Each one enters through compliance so complete that we usually reserve the word compliance for the moment the will becomes conscious of having limits. Lived reverence approaches those limits differently. It can feel authority moving there and recognize that existence has always taken place inside conditions it did not create.
From that recognition comes a willingness to spread seeds with an evangelical spirit, sometimes passing by as images kept later on by future selves.
An image may be received years before its interpretation. Something visible enters the body and remains where language cannot yet reach it. A person bows their head in a way that contains more than the observer knows how to name. A sentence carries a temperature beyond its meaning. The arrangement of worship impresses itself upon someone who still believes they are only watching. Nothing announces itself as a beginning.
Existence phases through temporal dimensions, and the future self comes upon what the earlier self kept without knowing it had kept anything. The image has remained somewhere in the natural mental environment, changing through its concealment, perhaps drawing other images toward it, until the person acquires enough distance from who they were to recognize what had been placed there. What was visible to the eye enters another visibility through interpretation. The body’s convergence in its natural environment continues inside the mind, where a remembered image may still carry the pressure of the room in which it first appeared.
North and South, if you will.
I keep imagining the soul’s poles becoming more influential and aware of the magnetic fields passing between them, aware that an inward movement can begin beyond the small circle where conscious explanation waits to claim it. One pole has already inclined itself toward the highest order. The other carries its own ordinance, accumulated through habit and defended through familiarity. Their fields cross. Something in the person turns before the person has found the language for turning.
Astral ordinance becomes available from there, first as an image and then as a disturbance in scale. The stars remain where the eye receives them, while the mind crosses the distance and encounters its inability to contain what it can still conceive. Looking upward gives the body an experience of its own locality. The flesh is here. The imagination has already breached into territories whose physical dimensions would erase the proportions by which here ordinarily makes sense.
When you zoom out of experience and sit idle with concepts that far surpass the limitations of flesh, the mind carries some remainder of the body with it. It uses distance, motion, location. It reaches for Time.
Time as an experience that is strictly Human, emergent as a logical scaffolding that helps God define the act of motion as it passes, though even that phrasing presses against something I cannot fully make visible, because define belongs to language and motion belongs to sequence, and God cannot be situated at the farthest point of a sequence whose possibility already depends upon Him. The scaffolding rises inside the human reception of movement. Before, during, after. The mind climbs by these divisions. It can look back at what has passed and feel the continuing influence of something no longer physically present, which is how a sentence written centuries ago enters a person traveling toward a city that carries the writer’s name.
The movement becomes essentially enthralled by whatever allows it to pass.
Here the thought catches on the moral condition of the person thinking it. The mind can travel beyond the stars through conception and still return to the exact body where sin acquired its local history, where the will made arrangements against the authority it now wants to serve, and where my immoral inadequacies wait inside the grammar of confession.
Immoral adequacy’s absolve of me and my sin.
The phrase arrives damaged. I leave it damaged long enough to hear what it is trying to separate.
Absolve of me.
As though sin had entered the structure so deeply that forgiveness would have to draw it outward through the same opening where the confession passed, removing an occupation from within the will, relieving the mind of the labor required to protect what it had already become ashamed of protecting. The inadequacy cannot perform the absolution. It reveals the region where absolution must be received. Even here I can feel language reaching ahead of my ability to order it, creating an error that may contain the pressure of the intended meaning more faithfully than a corrected sentence would.
Restored Christian carries that pressure for me. Restoration suggests something remained beneath what happened to it. Perhaps a capacity for orientation. Perhaps the image of worship kept by a future self. The will experiences grace and recognizes a structure it had spent years resisting as though recognition were occurring through memory, though I cannot say when the memory entered or whose voice first placed it there.
Now the road keeps drawing the physical place closer.
Saint Augustine is ahead of me first as a name, then as whatever begins to gather around the name when distance decreases. The city bears it without containing everything it has come to mean inside my faith. I may arrive and find that the correspondence remains private, moving underneath the visible place, or that one passing image enters me and waits beyond the visit for another self.
The city has not appeared yet in full. Only the direction of it, the name increasing its field around the car, Augustine, Augustine, and the mind leaning toward what the body has not seen.
– Camigula
