Packing and St. Augustine

This morning we continued packing stuff to take to St. Vincent de Paul. Despite hauling off two car-loads and a truck-load, there is still an amazing amount of stuff here. We are waiting to take more materials to the library so as not to dump things on them today when they are in the middle of their final book sale of the year. So the forty or fifty bags filled with books and now cluttering up our home library space will be gone next week. And Helen will be taking some boxes away with her when she returns to St. Paul. When that is out of the way, the house will look less filled. We are getting down to stuff we intend to take with us. Even so more must be done.

It reminds me of this legend:

There is a story that St. Augustine was walking on the beach contemplating the mystery of the Trinity. Then he saw a boy in front of him who had dug a hole in the sand and was going out to the sea again and again and bringing some water to pour into the hole. St. Augustine asked him, “What are you doing?” “I’m going to pour the entire ocean into this hole.” “That is impossible, the whole ocean will not fit in the hole you have made” said St. Augustine. The boy replied, “And you cannot fit the Trinity in your tiny little brain.” The story concludes by saying that the boy vanished because St. Augustine had been talking to an angel.

Well, we are not putting all this into a hole, but it does occasionally feel like trying to empty out the ocean.
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The Augustine story reminds me of a joke.

For many years, it was traditional in the Catholic Church for children who were being confirmed to be asked questions by the confirming bishop to prove they were prepared to receive the sacrament. 

On one occasion, when Bishop Flannery was confirming a group of children who were still quite young, he asked one boy, "What is the doctrine of the Trinity."

The boy had a distinctive lisp, and he responded, "The doctwin of the Twinity ith that there ith one God and thwee pewsonth."

The bishop shook his head to clear it and asked the boy to repeat what he had said.

This time the boy spoke slowly and loudly, thinking the bishop must be deaf: "THE DOCTWIN OF THE TWINITY ITH THAT THERE ITH ONE GOD AND THWEE PEWSONTH!"

The bishop looked helplessly at the nun who had prepared the children and then back at the little boy.

"I'm sorry," he said kindly, "but I don't understand what you are saying."

The boy grinned broadly.

"Of courth not! It'th a mythtewy!"