Prayers from the Confessions - Book 1

How should the God who made heaven and earth come into me? What am I to you that you should command me to love you?

For in truth, all good things are from you, O God. From you derives all manner of being, all existence, O God most beautiful, who endow all things with their beautiful form and by your governance direct them in their due order.

My faith calls calls upon you, Lord, this faith which is your gift to me, which you have breathed into me through the humanity of your Son, and the ministry of one of your preachers.

The house of my soul is too small for you to enter: make it more spacious by your coming.

O Lord my God, tell me what you are to me. Say to my soul, I am your salvation. Say it so that I can hear it. My heart is listening, Lord; open the ears of my heart and say to my soul, "I am your salvation". Let me run toward this voice and seize hold of you. Do not hide your face from me: let me die so that I may see it, for not to see it would be death to me indeed.

To whom but yourself can I cry, Cleanse me of my hidden sins, O Lord, and for those incurred through others pardon your servant?

Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we humans, who are part of your creation, long to praise you -we, who carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin, and with it the proof that you thwart the proud.

Hear my prayer, Lord. Let not my soul faint under your discipline, nor let me weary as I confess before you those acts of mercy by which you plucked me from all my evil ways. I long for you to grow sweeter to me than all those allurements I was pursuing. You have enabled me to love you with all my strength, and with passionate yearning grasp your hand, so that you may rescue me from every temptation until my life's end.

Translated by Maria Boulding, OSB

Posted by Carlos J. Medina

St. Teresa of Jesus on the Confessions

It was at this time that I was given the Confessions of Saint Augustine, and I think the Lord must have ordained this, for I did not ask for the book nor had I ever seen it. I have a great affection for Saint Augustine, because the convent in which I had lived before becoming a nun belonged to his Order, and also because he had been a sinner. I used to find a great deal of comfort in reading about the lives of saints who had been sinners before the Lord brought them back to Himself. As He had forgiven them I thought that He might do the same for me. There was only one thing that troubled me, and this I have already mentioned: namely that, after the Lord had once called them, they did not fall again, whereas I had fallen so often that I was distressed by it. But when I thought of His love for me, I would take heart once more, for I never doubted His mercy, though I often doubted myself.

Oh, God help me! How amazed I am when I think how hard my heart was despite all the help I had received from Him! It really frightens me to remember how little I could do by myself and how I was so tied and bound that I could not resolve to give myself wholly to God. When I started to read the Confessions, I seemed to see myself in them and I began to commend myself often to that glorious Saint. When I got as far as his conversion and read how he heard that voice in the garden, it seemed exactly as if the Lord were speaking in that way to me, or so my heart felt. I remained for a long time dissolved in tears, in great distress and affliction. Dear God, what a soul suffers and what torments it endures when it loses its freedom to be its own master! I am astonished now that I was able to live in such a state of torment. God be praised, Who gave me life to forsake such utter death!

Taken from The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila; painting by Rubens taken from here.

Posted by Carlos J. Medina, Novice