The Book That Fell Open in a Milan Garden

In the summer of 386 AD, a thirty-one-year-old rhetoric professor sat weeping beneath a fig tree in a Milan garden. Augustine of Hippo had spent years chasing ambition, pleasure, and philosophical systems that left him emptier with each pursuit. He knew the truth intellectually but could not release the life that held him captive. "Tomorrow, tomorrow," he kept telling himself. Always tomorrow.

Then he heard a child's singsong voice from a neighboring yard: "Tolle lege, tolle lege" — "Take up and read." He grabbed the scroll of Paul's letters lying on a bench and his eyes fell on these very words from Romans 13: "Let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light... put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh."

Augustine later wrote that he needed to read no further. Light flooded the darkness he had nursed for years. He closed the book, and the long tomorrow finally became today.

What strikes me about Augustine's story is how long he lingered at the threshold. He knew the hour. He sensed the dawn pressing against the horizon of his life. Yet he kept pulling the covers of his old habits over his head.