the second most important mother-son team in all Christendom.....

.....I'll mostly leave for Gerard and Narwen and all the other usual suspects --- even Amy this time --- to write about. But I could not let pass this meditation from St. Augustine's Confessions, from today's Office of Readings:

Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new,
late have I loved you!
Lo, you were within,
but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made
I rushed headlong --- I, misshapen.
You were with me, but I was not with you.
They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being,
were they not in you.
You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance, I gasped;
and now I pant for you;
I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.
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