When it is said
It is not part of any Orthodox service or prayer book. Augustine prayed it in writing, as he told the story of his life to God in his Confessions.
Anyone may say it, at any hour. It fits a time when your own strength has run out, or when you are coming back to God after drifting away.
Where it comes from
Author known
Where it comes from
Augustine was bishop of Hippo, today Annaba in Algeria, and died in AD 430. About AD 400 he wrote his Confessions, the story of his life told to God. This prayer is the last paragraph of its fourth part. That part covers nine years of his youth, from 19 to 28. In them he lost a friend and followed the Manichees, a religion he later called a falsehood.
Augustine, Confessions, Book 4, tr. J. G. Pilkington (1886); Encyclopaedia Britannica, St. Augustine; Orthodox Church in America, Blessed Augustine, Bishop of Hippo
From a nest to wings
Just before the prayer, Augustine looks back on his quick mind and how little good it did him. Slower believers, he says, never wandered far from God. They stayed safe in the nest of the Church, like chicks growing their feathers. That picture leads straight into the prayer: let us hope in the shadow of Your wings.
Blessed or Saint?
The Orthodox keep Augustine’s feast on 15 June. The Orthodox Church in America calls him Blessed Augustine. The Greek book of the saints’ lives, the Synaxarion, calls him Saint Augustine. Either way, he is a Father of the early Church whom the Orthodox honour.
Orthodox Church in America, Blessed Augustine, Bishop of Hippo; Orthodox Synaxarion (saint.gr), Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo
What the words mean
Strength and weakness
Augustine plays on two Latin words that sound alike: firmitas, strength, and infirmitas, weakness. Our strength is strength only when it is God Himself. When it is our own, it is weakness. He plays on words again in the next lines: we turned away (aversi), and so we were turned aside (perversi).
A different ending in some books
Potts’s Prayers of the Early Church (1953) prints a shorter form of this prayer, titled “For Refreshment”. It ends “for with Thee is refreshment and true strength”. Those last words are Augustine’s too, but they come from the first paragraph of the next part of his Confessions, Book 5.
J. Manning Potts, Prayers of the Early Church (1953); Augustine, Confessions, Book 5, tr. J. G. Pilkington (1886)
The Scripture in it
How precious is Your loving devotion, O God, that the children of men take refuge in the shadow of Your wings!
Even to your old age, I will be the same, and I will bear you up when you turn gray. I have made you, and I will carry you; I will sustain you and deliver you.
Bible text: Berean Standard Bible, public domain.
In Latin
O Domine Deus noster, in velamento alarum Tuarum speremus, et protege nos et porta nos.
Tu portabis et parvulos et usque ad canos Tu portabis, quoniam firmitas nostra quando Tu es, tunc est firmitas, cum autem nostra est, infirmitas est.
Vivit apud Te semper bonum nostrum, et quia inde aversi sumus, perversi sumus.
Revertamur iam, Domine, ut non evertamur, quia vivit apud Te sine ullo defectu bonum nostrum, quod Tu Ipse es, et non timemus ne non sit quo redeamus, quia nos inde ruimus.
Nobis autem absentibus non ruit domus nostra, aeternitas Tua.
From Confessions, Book 4, as printed by The Latin Library, with capitals for God.