Late have I loved You...

Today the Church celebrates the feast of Saint Augustine, whom we as Augustinians call our spiritual father, whose example and model, as well as Rule, of religious life we follow, and whose searching heart we strive to imitate.

The Confessions of St. Augustine was the first book I read upon my coming back to the Church in 2005. I was on a retreat and had the book recommended to me by a confessor, a kind and gentle man who was able to see beyond the great sins I was confessing to a heart that was searching and seeking for something greater, for something real, for something true. This confessor, who would later become my first Augustinian spiritual director, saw in my own journey many parallels with that of Saint Augustine, a man about whom I knew nothing at all.

I took this dear friar's advice and upon returning home from retreat I ordered the book and began reading it immediately upon its arrival. From the opening lines I was hooked, and I saw in Augustine a man who was articulating my own struggle, my own desires, my own restlessness, and who was shedding a luminous vision upon my own wounded heart.

So Augustine's Confessions famously begins:

Great are You, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Your power, and of Your wisdom there is no end. And man, being a part of Your creation, desires to praise You, man, who bears about with him his mortality, the witness of his sin, even the witness that You resist the proud, — yet man, this part of Your creation, desires to praise You. You move us to delight in praising You; for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in You.

This restlessness is the great human condition that Augustine explored from the perspective of his own lived experience, and in giving such beautiful articulation to this common struggle of every man he opened for all of us an interior passageway to the lived reality of the presence of God.

For Augustine, everything came down to the profound encounter with Jesus Christ to which every human being is beckoned. To encounter Jesus Christ is to enter into the mystery of life, the depths of beauty, and the experience of truth. Augustine saw that relationship with Jesus Christ was particularly experienced in our life in community with one another. It is for this reason that after his conversion and baptism he first lived in a kind of religious community, with friends who all together took up the common search for God.

This community experience profoundly affected Augustine, and so on his return to Africa he founded a monastery, and again after being called - against his will - to be a priest and bishop of the Church, he again founded a monastery, so that no matter where his duties would take him, he would always have a community to which he could return and live with his brothers. Eventually Augustine would write a rule for community living, the rule which we as Augustinians, but in fact many other Orders, as well, follow in our own religious life. This rule was deeply rooted in the community experience of the early Church as described in the Acts of the Apostles, and so Augustine writes, "The main purpose for you having come together is to live harmoniously in your house, intent upon God in oneness of mind and heart."

As Augustinians, though the Order was founded in 1244, Augustine always looms as our spiritual father, our guide, and we look to him for his theology, his philosophy, but especially for his spirituality so deeply rooted in love of Scripture, his profound sense of the need for community, and his particular emphasis on the humanity of the crucified Christ. He was a true contemplative who saw that his life of prayer brought him not only into deeper communion with God, but in Christ it brought him into deeper and truer communion with all humanity. He teaches us to set our hearts on what is truly good and beautiful and true, and to turn away from the vapid riches of the world. In one of his most beautiful passages from Book X of the Confessions he writes:

Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Behold, you were within me, while I was outside: it was there that I sought you, and, a deformed creature, rushed headlong upon these things of beauty which you have made. You were with me, but I was not with you. They kept me far from you, those fair things which, if they were not in you, would not exist at all. You have called to me, and have cried out, and have shattered my deafness. You have blazed forth with light, and have shone upon me, and you have put my blindness to flight! You have sent forth fragrance, and I have drawn in my breath, and I pant after you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst after you. You have touched me, and I have burned for Your peace.

On this Feast of St. Augustine, may we all discover that true love which sets our hearts ablaze and fills us with the peace which can only come through Jesus Christ.

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