I picked up a biography on Saint Augustine at a used bookstore the other day and I’m fascinated by his life. Here is a quote showing how Augustine forged a bond with his community as he taught and interacted with them. This is why it is good to teach (with intentionality)!
“If it becomes boring to repeat the same things to beginners, we should put ourselves in their affectionate brother’s place, or their mother’s or father’s. Then such will be our empathy with what they are feeling that what is said will become new to us again. The effect of this sympathy is so great that when listeners are moved as we speak, we enter into each other’s reactions, as the hearers speak in us and we learn in them what we were teaching. Isn’t that what happens when we show others beautiful scenes which we have often gone past with a careless glance, but which give us fresh joy as we share others’ joy on first seeing them? And the intensity of this experience is the greater, the closer we are to each other. The more, by the bond of love, we enter into each other’s mind, the more even old things become new for us again.” (Instruction 17)
from Saint Augustine, Garry Wills, p. 72.
