So far during Lent I've read Confessions by St. Augustine and Walking with Mary by Edward Sri. One is by a saint who lived close to the time of Constantine and the transition of the Roman Empire to Christianity, the other is written by a theologian living today about the mother of Jesus. Confessions has 10 books of personal backstory leading to Augustine's conversion to the catholic faith, and then 3 books of philosophy, analyzing the nature of time, eternity and creation.

What stood out the most to me in Augustine's Confessions was book 11, and how it analyzed and meditated on the nature of time. This was presaged in the Editor's Remarks of the book:

This was the Editor, Matthew K. Minerd, gently prodding the reader to stick with the book even after Augustine's conversion in book 10, because the last 3 books have some deep thinking on the nature of time and how the mystery of time is irreducibly related to the mystery of creation and of God himself. This is a connection I've written about but I'm only getting started on this journey.

One more remark about Confessions, it is a central belief in the Catholic faith that the New Testament events like Jesus' birth from virgin Mary, his miracles, and his death on the cross, and subsequent resurrection, are literally true. They happened. The last book, book 13 of Confessions, interprets Genesis allegorically. This means that the creation story of the earth being created in 6 days is, by this early saints understanding, not literally true.
Back when I was an atheist, I would spend a lot of time roasting Young Earth Creationism. It's a sign of American historical illiteracy that the so many American Christians are young earthers despite the original Christian church, back in the fourth century, already having understood Genesis in this allegorical sense. The Protestant Reformation that started ~1200 years after Augustine, and ~500 years before the current day, has created communities of believers who have forgotten this older understanding.

In Augustine's own words:

Another thing I'll add is that the 21st century understanding of time in physics agrees with this understanding of time. A lack of matter and form would mean time can't be measured, and therefore has no physical meaning.

After that personal diary + philosophical treatise, I read this much more readable account of what the New Testament tells us about Mary, the mother of Jesus.

The book was prompted by an incident that happened when the author, Edward Sri, had a Protestant roommate who pressed him on questions about the Catholic faith, questions he couldn't answer. The work the author did after that, to answer those questions, lead to the creation of this book. My read on this "creation story" of the book, is that many Protestants don't understand the specific details of Catholic doctrine because of their doctrine of Sola Scriptura, which means "by scripture alone". This leads to individuals who form their own interpretation of scripture, chafe against the incumbent Christian authorities, and then split off and form their own sect. This has happened so many times since the Reformation that I can't count the number of Protestant churches. A much healthier tendency is what the Catholic church attempts to do with ecumenical councils, where they try to work out doctrinal differences and stay unified. This is harder than just exiting and forming your own thing. Only an institution that really cared and had a long term perspective would attempt that thankless work, but it's important, and I'm grateful for the church for doing this over the centuries.

Walking with Mary spends a lot of time analyzing the words used at pivotal points in the story of Jesus. The motif of "wrapped" and "laid" in the New Testament span the beginning and the end of Jesus' story. Mary wrapped baby Jesus in swaddling cloth and laid him in the manger. Then Mary wrapped Jesus in cloth and laid him in the tomb.

The book also highlights the nature of being called, and of the role ordinary people can have in God's plan. Despite the fact that ancient Israelite religion had both a divine aristocracy and a shared belief in a coming Messiah, the actual Messiah who arrived was born to a humble woman from Nazareth, and the only connection to the Davidic aristocracy was Joseph, who was married to her but had not yet consummated that marriage.

The final thing I took away from the book was the way that suffering can be meaningful. Naive utilitarian ethics describes suffering as negative utility, and pleasure as positive utility, so it would conclude that simply not existing is better than living a life of mostly suffering. It's just math. But Mary suffered the ultimate loss, the loss of her only son, while alive, and despite that, she was obedient to God and stood by her son on the cross, even when most of his disciple's had abandoned him. The meaning of suffering is gift, just as the self-evident gift of joy. Non-existence is worse than both.

This quote exemplifies the difficult message I took away from the book:

I hope you keep all these things, pondering them in your hearts.

The next Lenten book I have lined up is Timeless: A History of the Catholic Church, the focus will shift from inside (inside Augstine's mind, inside Mary's mind), to outside, to the history of the Church herself and the external impact she's had. The one through-line with this choice of book is in its title: Timeless. Confessions was a meditation on time & eternity, and how that illuminates the nature of God. Walking with Mary was about the time between "the fullness of time" when the immaculate conception happened to when "His hour had come". I look forward to the future time when I will get to share with you what I learned from the next book. I appreciate you walking with me through this post.