To Be Drawn

Turning to Christ? It is never, as with all important changes, simply a question of amassing information and moving toward an apparent and obvious conclusion. A host of complex feelings and thoughts attend any important decision or change. Indeed, the precise reason why we choose one option over another may not even be clear. What moves a person in turning toward Christ?

While knowledge has an important role in Christian conversion and nurture, its role has never been preeminent. Reason helps and attends, but something else gives a decisive pull, something which, again and again, theologians have called “love”. A person is drawn to God, pulled by God’s own love to see and sense more and more what God gives, which again is God’s love. The love which draws is given, but given in such a way that it inflames a deeper love which heightens longing. Of the saints who have turned to this question—how we come to faith—St. Augustine stands as a giant and a great champion of “love.” In a sense, Augustine shows the allure and beauty of God as the cause of all salvation.

In a tract on John’s Gospel, commenting on the phrase “No one comes to me, unless the Father draws him.”, Augustine says that “the soul is drawn by love.” To the objection, still voiced today, particularly among Evangelical Christians, “How do I believe with the will [my free will or choice] if I am drawn?” Augustine answers, “It’s not enough to use the will, you are drawn by desire.” Augustine turns his focus on faith’s origin in God, not in oneself. God draws by love, prompting a loving response. He calls this inner working of emotion “a certain desire of the heart to which is this sweet celestial bread.” Continuing, he identifies attraction as a defining influences. “A person is drawn to Christ who is delighted by the truth, is delighted by beauty, is delighted by justice, is delighted by eternal life, for Christ is all these things.” The passive verbal construction is significant, highlighting that the person drawn is not “doing” something, but rather being pulled by the hidden and mysterious subject, which is God. Is this difficult to understand? Not in the least, Augustine says. We have examples all about us.

“Show me someone who loves, he knows what I mean. Show me someone full of desire, someone hungering, some thirsty wayfarer in the desert desiring the fount of an eternal homeland. Give me such. They know what I mean.” He gives an illustration, “Show a leafy branch to a sheep, and you draw it. Nuts are shown to a child and he is drawn. And where he runs, he is drawn by loving.” Augustine is careful to avoid any sense of compulsion which would override human freedom. “He is drawn without provocation of the body.” Rather, “he is drawn by the chain of the heart.” Speaking in the first person as if for God, he says “I give what he loves; I give what he hopes for.”

Throughout this subtle discussion of God’s alluring love, Augustine has in mind that salvation is rooted from first to last in the loving desire of God for the world. A passive response, though rendered without violation to free will, is a response inspired entirely by God’s love.

This is not only an insight for personal reflection, even prayer, but also a needed corrective to any version of Christian life which seems to make the whole enterprise dependent upon US. Rather, God who is all in all does all the loving and drawing. We, like someone thirsting or hungering, or someone newly in love, are drawn into the mystery of God’s love and beauty and justice.

Almost always, Augustine comes to our aid.