Saint Augustine's vision of Jesus

In "Beautiful Outlaw: Experiencing the Playful, Disruptive, Extravagant Personality of Jesus," John Eldredge shares an interesting way that Saint Augustine encountered Jesus (pp. 181-183):

[Saint Augustine] was quite an accomplished sinner, by his own admission, a man we would send to a recovery center for sexual addictions. Though he had the opportunity to sit under the preaching of Ambrose, and though his own mother was praying night and day -- a most effective weapon for turning a wayward soul -- he was bound to his darkness. 'I was in torment,' he wrote. Until that fateful day when in a garden, he heard God speak -- through the voice of a child over a wall:

Somehow I flung myself down beneath a fig tree and gave way to the tears which now streamed from my eyes, the sacrifice that is acceptable to you.... For I felt that I was still the captive of my sins, and in my misery I kept crying, 'How long shall I go on saying, 'tomorrow, tomorrow'? Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment?' I was asking myself these questions, weeping all the while with the most bitter sorrow in my heart, when all at once I heard the singsong voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or a girl I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain 'Take it and read, take it and read.' At this I looked up, thinking hard whether there was any kind of game in which children used to chant words like these, but I could not remember ever hearing them before. I stemmed my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall.

He does. They are the very words he needed to hear from God. And in that moment, which would end up echoing throughout the world, 'You converted me to yourself.' Take it can read, or take up and read, depending on the translator. Tolle lege in the Latin. I think we've missed the playfulness of this. Augustine is a voracious reader. Books are his language. Jesus -- who sent the fisherman fishing and the tax collector to hand out charity -- tells Augustine to get up and read. Open the book, you bookworm. Through the singsong chant of a child, which adds an even more playful touch. Jesus was singing his tune.

I find it thoroughly fascinating the way that Jesus connects with each of us individually.