St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church

I managed to get through the entirety of the day yesterday without remembering that it was the memorial of St.  Monica. Today, we celebrate the memorial of her son, St. Augustine, bishop and doctor of the Church. Or, in the words of one commentator, the “sinner turned saint.”

I’ve shared before how important Augustine’s Confessions was to me at the time of my conversion from Buddhism back to Christianity. Indeed, I’ve often thought that it would have been a great help for me if someone has suggested that I read that work when I was 17 and engaged in the struggle that resulted in my abandonment of Catholicism for over twenty years. Augustine’s humanness and his brokenness are evident in that work, as was his intense sorrow for his sins and his equally intense longing for God. At a time when I was having great difficulty finding my way, the book was a great help to me.

I deeply relate to Augustine’s words to God,

You were with me, but I was not with you. Things held me far from you- things which, if they were not in you, were not at all. You called, and shouted, and burst my deafness. You flashed and shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odors and I drew in breath – and I pant for you. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

After writing his Confressions (and I’ve shared this before), Augustine asked himself whether it was good that he had done so. He wondered: If I’ve come to regret my sinful past and if I believe God has forgiven me, why not simply put my past behind me. Why bother putting all this bad stuff from my past down on paper? His answer to that question was that it was the recognition of his own sinfulness that had led him to recognize the love of God. It was only when he realized the depth and extent of the presence of sin in his life that he was able to see who God is and how God worked in his life. Thus, for Augustine, recalling his sinfulness was a necessary part of his praise of God.

That seems to me to be a useful perspective for all of us to keep in mind. But it may be especially useful for those people who have difficulty with the idea of Reconciliation and the idea of confessing their sins. What Augustine understood, in the words of theologian Michael Himes, was that confession “is not about how wicked I have been but rather about how good God is. Like all sacraments, reconciliation is not primarily about my action, whether good or bad, but about God’s action.” There is something incredibly powerful about our own articulation of our sins and our hearing the words of absolution.

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Lamenting Our Necessities

I’m in Norman, Oklahoma for the fifth annual gathering of the Conference of Catholic Legal Thought, an association of law professors interested in exploring how the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition impacts our thoughts about the law. Since the group includes many dear friends, it is always a joy for me when we gather.

Yesterday was our opening session and our focus was The Essential St. Augustine for 21st Century Lawyers and Law Professors. Paul Griffiths of the Duke Dinivity School gave a wonderful talk, followed by several respondents.

Of the many things that stayed with me from Griffiths talk, the one I woke up reflecting on was the phrase de necessitatibus meis erue me, deliver me from my necessities, a phrase taken from Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 24.

The phrase recognizes that there are consequences of the fall – that we live in a world that is not “the city of God.” A world where we are compelled at times to do things that are not ideal. For Augustine, the appropriate attitude in such situations is to lament our necessities.

Thus, for example, there may be times when war is called for, when we must send off our young men and women to fight battles. We do so because we must, but, says Augustine, the proper stance when we do is one of lament – we lament the necessity. The same is true for our need to inflict punishment on criminals.

I don’t hear much lamenting of our necessities in public affairs these days and I think it would be good if we recovered a sense of lament. Thus, to use a recent example, it may have been necessary for the US to kill Osama bin Laden, but we lament the need to take a human life.

Perhaps when we pray for our service men and women at Mass, as we often do during out petitions, we might include a lament that we need to send them off to war at all.

Desire for God

Part of my Mother’s Day gift from my daughter and husband this year was a book titled, For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics, a title that gives more than a hint of the book’s contents. The book contains poets of both the Western and Eastern Christian traditions, spanning the years from the Desert Fathers to contemporary voices. The poems are accompanied by short commentaries by Roger Housden, who put together the collection.

One of the first poems I opened to is a beautiful poem of longing written by St. Augustine, which I had not before been familiar with. It is titled, I Came to Love You Too Late. In it, Augustine comes to a realization that is importnat to all of us – that the God we seek has been inside of us all along. He writes

I came to love you too late, Oh Beauty,
so ancient and so new. Yes,
I came to love you too late. What did I know?
You were inside me, and I was
out of my body and mind, looking
for you.
I drove like an ugly madman against
the beautiful things and beings
you made.
You were in inside me, but I was not inside you….
You called to me and cried to me; you broke the bowl
of my deafness; you uncovered your beams, and threw them
at me; you rejected my blindness; you blew a fragrant wind
on me, and
I sucked in my breath and wanted you; I tasted you
and now I want you as I want food and water; you
touched me, and I have been burning ever since to
have your peace.

St. Augustine

Today the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St. Augustine. It is hard to pick one thing to say about Augustine, who was such an important person in the development of Western Christianity. Pope Benedict has this to say about Augustine:

“There is hardly a saint who has remained so close to us, so understandable, despite the lapse of centuries, as Saint Augustine, for in his writings we encounter all the heights and depths of the human spirit, all the questioning, and seeking and searching that are still ours today.”

Augustine was a prolific writer, but the work of his that was most important to me during the time of my conversion back to Christianity from Buddhism was his Confessions. His humanness and his brokenness are evident, as is his intense sorrow for his sins and his equally intense longing for God. At a time when I was having great difficulty finding my way, I found it very helpful, comforting even.

Interestingly, after writing his Confressions, Augustine asked himself whether it was good that he had done so. He wondered: If I’ve come to regret my sinful past and if I believe God has forgiven me, why not simply put my past behind me. Why bother putting all this bad stuff from my past down on paper? His answer to that question was that it was the recognition of his own sinfulness that had led him to recognize the love of God. It was only when he realized the depth and extent of the presence of sin in his life that he was able to see who God is and how God worked in his life. Thus, for Augustine, recalling his sinfulness was a necessary part of his praise of God.

That seems to me to be a useful perspective for all of us to keep in mind. But it may be especially useful for those people who have difficulty with the idea of Reconciliation and the idea of confessing their sins. What Augustine understood, in the words of theologian Michael Himes, was that confession “is not about how wicked I have been but rather about how good God is. Like all sacraments, reconciliation is not primarily about my action, whether good or bad, but about God’s action.”