Word of the Day: raffish I wonder, twenty or thirty years from now, how I’m going to remember my Rome semester. What will I remember? Will it be the joy I felt at being back in Rome, or the nervous, scatterbrained mess I was before ten day? Will it be the beauty of the blue Sicilian sky, the welcoming arms of the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square, or performing The Learned Women on a dark night in the amphitheatre? Or will it be sitting in the dim, silent chapel on retreat, waiting to receive the sacrament of penitence and reading Augustine’s Confessions? I didn’t realize then how appropriate reading Augustine was at the retreat, but, through an irony or coincidence that is beyond me, it was. Looking back on my semester now, I always think of the retreat weekend as one of the best of the whole semester and a turning point. I only spoke the praises of God; I was alone in silence with God, with Augustine to help me. I followed Augustine through his journey to God, all the while thinking to myself that I was on the same journey of conversion of the heart and the will, searching for truth that I cannot deny. In that quiet time, with God as my object and Augustine as my mirror, I felt that I could change with the grace of God. In the present, in the now, as I write, I remember the retreat. In my memory, along with all the other full memories I have of my semester, I collect and order what was scattered and disordered. According to Augustine, memory is not simply a storehouse to contain certain moments of life, but it also organizes thoughts and memories and, through this organization, leads to continence, which God requires for a submission of will. As I sit in my room thinking about the past, I’m making a picture of myself before the retreat and a picture of myself after the retreat, organizing thoughts and memories and bringing them into the present so that I can project them into what I hope for the future. The function of memory to order and organize is, not only for me but for all people, a means to unite the divided selves, the self of sin, destruction, and self-will, and the self that longs for truth and peace. Over the retreat weekend I felt, for the first time, my divided self, one which wanted to sin though knowing it was painful for me and God, and one which wanted to become holy and most like God I could become. I became aware of the division within my soul and began, that very weekend, to seek God’s grace to help me become continent, to love what is true and not to will what I loved to be true. I began that weekend slowly to collect the past and order it in my mind, remembering my sins, my faults, and my rare moments of true grace and help from God, both good and bad times, and projected a goal of myself, a picture of me in the full submission to the will of God despite the situation, joyful and happy, into the future. That’s the goal I still, today, project into the future from the collection and organization of my thoughts and memories both before and since then. All of life seems to be a never-ending collection of memories and projecting an image produced from the organization of the collection into the future. It is what Augustine does in his Confessions for his parishioners, for his future readers, and for God, and it seems to be what all men do when seeking God. Contained within memory is a knowledge of God, because one must have something dis-membered, fragmented, forgotten, in order to re-member it. No one gets it right the first time. God, as Creator, places knowledge of Himself into one’s soul and mind in order for one to put Him together again through the continence of one’s soul. So then, in man’s travels towards and conversions to God, the path to grace and faith must not be discovered but instead remembered through this process of collection and projection. This piecing together of the knowledge of God, the knowledge that has been in my mind and heart since the beginning of my being, began much earlier than that cold weekend at the end of February in the mountains of Lake Albano, just like for Augustine it began earlier than his conversion in the garden, but my time on retreat was a turning point, like Augustine first reading Cicero and burning for Truth. It was a sort of mini-culmination, in my journey towards the final uniting of my divided and discontinent selves and the happiness, peace, and truth which I have sought.