Homily for August 28th, 2014: Memorial of St. Augustine
We celebrate
today with joy one of the great men of the ancient Church: St. Augustine. Born in North Africa in 354 to
a pagan father and the devout Christian mother, Monica, whom we celebrated
yesterday, Augustine was 33 before he was baptized by the great bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose.
Augustine tells the story of his dramatic conversion in his Confessions.
Augustine was
33 and on the point of accepting Christian faith, and asking for baptism. Only
his inability to master his strong sexual desires held him back. Sitting on a
summer day in the garden of his house, Augustine uttered an agonized prayer for
purity. “How long, O Lord, how long will I hear tomorrow, and again tomorrow?
Why not now? Why can there not be an end to my impurity right now?”
All
at once Augustine heard a child’s voice from a neighboring house saying over
and over the Latin words, Tolle, lege.
They may have been merely a child’s game, like “Eeny, Meeney, Miney, Moe.” But Augustine
took them literally: “Take up and read.”
Seizing the scroll he had been reading, which contained Paul’s letter to
the Romans, Augustine’s eyes fell on the words: “Let us cast off deeds of
darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us live honorably as in daylight;
not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual excess and lust ... Rather put
on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.”
“The
very instant I finished that sentence,” Augustine writes, “light flooded my
heart, and every shadow of doubt disappeared.” He was baptized by Ambrose the
following Easter.
He died at on
this day 430, at age 75 and having been bishop of Hippo in North
Africa for 35 years. He had dictated to scribes millions of words
about the faith which have been a rich source of Catholic theologians ever
since. The best known of these words is a single sentence, written out of
Augustine’s own life experience. It still speaks to us over 1500 years later: “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our
hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
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