A Window into our Life: Do Dominican contemplative nuns have restless hearts?
Published by Dominican Nuns Ireland in Reflections (Dominican) · 28 August 2018
Tags: Dominican, Life, Vocation
Tags: Dominican, Life, Vocation
After WMOF, it is good to come back to your own roots, to our ‘Grandfather’- St Augustine, as we Dominican brothers and sisters like to call him. St Dominic adopted from him not only the Rule, but also the RESTLESSNESS of the heart.
In ‘Confessions’ (1.1,1) he wrote:
You have made us for yourself,and our heart is restless until it rests in You.
Restlessness is not bad thing, that’s what makes us searchers in life. Restlessness keeps us unsatisfied and yearning for more. That ‘more’ is GOD.
We are made for Him. Our real rest is unity with God. Augustine said: ‘I had come to delight in the truth.’ I hated to be wrong’. The love of truth was leading him beyond all the easy answers and further on to ask the real questions. He had to know the essential of things, what doesn’t change, what doesn’t disappoint, what doesn’t deceive. By nature Augustine could not be satisfied with anything less than God.
For Augustine it was this very restlessness in his heart which brought him to a personal encounter with Christ, brought him to understand that the remote God he was seeking was the God who is close to every human being, the God close to our heart, who was ‘more inward than my innermost self’(C. 3.6,11)
Even in discovery of and encounter with God, Augustine did not stop, he did not withdraw into himself, like those who have already arrived, but continued his search. The restlessness of seeking truth brings him to the restlessness of love.
And Augustine let God make him restless.
Look into the depths of your heart, look into your own inner depths and ask yourself:
Do you have a heart that desires something great, or you satisfied yourself only by small things?
God awaits you, He seeks you, and how do you respond to Him?
Do you believe God is waiting for you?
Do you know how much you are loved by Him?
I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.
Confessions of St Augustine 10,27
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