On the walls of the cafeteria in the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, hang a collection of mosaics taken from a church or churches in Syria. They were made in about the year 400, the same year that Saint Augustine was alive and preaching in Carthage. I like the lunches at the Kimbell, but even more I like to see the mosaics and marvel that they were preserved before the great destruction of almost everything in Syria.

The images in the mosaics are colorful and beautiful images of birds and animals. The parrot, according to its label, was a symbol of the Virgin Mary, and the lovely peacock a symbol of eternal life. For a mostly illiterate congregation, assigning symbols to Christian persons or concepts must have been a helpful device, but, personally, I never think of Mary when I see the parrot, or eternal life when I see the peacock.

However, I do think of St. Augustine every time I visit the Kimbell cafeteria. I think with awe that I am sitting near some objects that were whole and complete at the same time that Augustine lived, even though his eyes almost certainly never rested on them.

St. Augustine, like almost all the early saints, has come in for controversy, but his “confessions” are still absorbing reading as he plumbs his conscience and his spirit on his trip to becoming a Christian. He describes how one by one his objections to Christianity disappear, until the last one with which he struggles the most, is finally dissolved as he sits in a friend’s garden and hears the sin-song voice of a child chanting, “Take it and read; take it and read.”

In response Augustine randomly opens the book of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and reads: Not in reveling or drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels or rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature or nature’s appetites. (Romans 13:13)

For the first time Augustine saw that what he was reluctant to give up as lost (natures’ appetites), was in fact not loss, but an exchange, an exchange for the friendship and companionship of one who loved him, Jesus the Christ.

It takes a long time for most of us to come to see and embrace that exchange, but in the Kimbell cafeteria the sight of those mosaics always reminds me that the exchange is real and belongs to me as well as to St. Augustine.

Love in Him,

Prue