A Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23 Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11 Luke 12:13-21
What do you do when there is not enough for you to solve the problem, when life asks more than you can give?
And the question is: What do you do when that time is now? It’s not just about what you will do in some possible future.
He retreated from his friend’s view, sat down under a tree and cried.
The irony was the disparity between his external circumstances and his inner turmoil. He had been born into a prosperous family. His parents had provided their brilliant son with the best possible education but with two results. It propelled him to the top of the intellectual world, and it firmly uprooted him from his family’s Catholicism.
As Catholic families go, they were uneven. His father had never joined the church, so neither had his two sons. His mother was the real Catholic, and she more than made up for the men in the family.
He had always had trouble believing what he read in the Bible. It seemed more fable than fact. And as for his mother’s Catholic faith, it struck him as a religion for simpletons, for those too timid to ask the tough questions. The farther he went from his family, both in reputation and in physical distance, the more he rejected his childhood faith.
The intellectual rage of his day was to divide the world into two equal, and forever antagonistic, forces, one good and one evil. The only way to navigate your way between the two was to listen to those who claimed special insight, of the sort given only to a chosen few.
But he was a seeker! He really believed that the world could be mastered by the intellect, that the only thing lacking was more effort on the part of enlightened ones, especially himself. He became famous for his academic prowess, arguing that a world of ideas stood far above our conflicted world. The more we consciously choose to pursue high ideals, he argued, the more we can free ourselves from the rot that stretches out behind and below us.
Granted, it was a somewhat selfish salvation that he preached. There was little to no concern for the less fortunate, for those who could not, would not or had never been given the opportunity to rise above.
So, why was he crying under that tree? Who can sum that up? By his own account, he had long been promiscuous. He bragged that there was no sin that he had not committed. He had always viewed sex as something he had mastered, but that day in the garden, he could see so plainly that sex had mastered him.
The more he lectured on the world of intelligence and ideals, the more disparity he felt between what he taught during the day and where he landed on so many nights. He had never married, though he had been faithful to a long-term live-in, a female companion. She would never have been a suitable choice for his family, though he did love her. He wrote that leaving her, after so many years, tore a hole in him. But now she was gone, while his mother searched for a more suitable bride. In the meantime, he wandered the dark corners of the night, seeking satisfaction.
He vacillated, to his own deep shame, between what he wanted and what he was. As he put it, “two wills fought it out—the old and the new, the one carnal, the other spiritual—and in their struggle tore my soul apart.”
Here is his description of that day in the garden.
But as this deep meditation dredged all my wretchedness up from the secret profundity of my being and heaped it all together before the eyes of my heart, a huge storm blew up within me and brought on a heavy rain of tears. In order to pour them out unchecked with the sobs that accompanied them I arose and left Alypius, for solitude seemed to be more suitable for the business of weeping…I flung myself down under a fig tree and gave free rein to the tears that burst from my eyes like rivers, as an acceptable sacrifice to you. Many things I had to say to you, and the gist of them, though not the precise words, was “O Lord, how long? How long? Will you be angry for ever? Do not remember our age-old sins. For by these I was conscious of being held prisoner. I uttered cries of misery: “Why must I go on saying ‘Tomorrow…tomorrow?’ Why not now? Why not put an end to my depravity this very hour? (VIII.26)
He was still weeping when he heard children, somewhere nearby. They were chanting a ditty about “taking and reading.” He had never heard such a rhyme and took it as a sign to pick up the scriptures he had brought with him to the garden. There he read in St. Paul:
Not in dissipation and drunkenness,
nor in debauchery and lewdness,
nor in arguing and jealousy;
but put on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and make no provisions for the flesh
or the gratification of your desires (Rom 13:13-14).
The words seemed to have been aimed at him. “I had no wish to read further, nor was there any need. No sooner had I reached the end of the verse than the light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shades of doubt fled away.”
That is his story, but we are still outside it. We cannot step inside St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430ad) and see him encounter Christ not as a concept but as a person, see him greet the lover he had sought in all the wrong places, encounter him as the crucified Lord who had risen from the dead to carry Augustine himself into new life.
His mother Monica had enrolled her newborn into the Order of Catechumens, those preparing for baptism, so technically Augustine had always been a Catholic. But like so many others who would come after him, his religion was a set of concepts, something he wielded, something he controlled, not the revelation of a person whom he could love.
Like the great St. Paul, who had written those lines, Augustine had always been a seeker of truth, someone who sincerely wanted to do the right and see it prevail. We do neither of them justice unless we see Paul and Augustine as alike in virtue. They excelled in so many of them: integrity, courageous boldness, the desire for truth, the refusal to compromise. But when virtues are not rooted in love, which is the supreme virtue, the ultimate strength, they can so easily be turned to serve the darkness.
Like the Apostles to the Gentiles before he set out on the road to Damascus, Augustine had always reduced Christ to an idea, a concept. This allowed him to debate his mother’s faith, to pick and choose, even to disdain. And if your religion is no more than a mental construct, à la carte is fine. The mind has a right, even a duty, to alter its ideas, but everything changes when we give our heart to another, for the heart must remain faithful to its love.
If Christ is only a concept, we are in charge. And Christ can remain no more than a concept in any form of faith. You can profess a hierarchical, apostolic church, a personal savior, and—the saddest of all—a “Jesus of history who has so much to teach us,” and still never meet the man. It is only when Christ becomes a person, someone who stands in front of us and speaks to us, that we can surrender to his presence. The world itself changes before the face of the beloved.
This is why quiet, personal prayer is the fundamental task of a disciple, because such prayer challenges our concepts and forces us to face our own unbelief. And then, amidst that dismantling fear, Christ comes to us.
Of course, Augustine wrote his autobiography, what we now call his Confessions, so that we might recognize this same Christ when we encounter him, when he moves from being an idea we wield to a person who stands before us, someone asking us to love him and to surrender to him. Indeed, from first to last, the Confessions addresses an unseen “You.” Like a lover reviewing his life in the presence of the beloved, Augustine confesses what this unseen “You” has accomplished in his life.
No one can deliver the “You,” whom St. Augustine encountered, to another. Concepts can be shared. We can explain them; they can entice another. But only the unseen lover of our souls can enter our lives and compel the surrender of our hearts.
Yearning alone will not produce him—perhaps a proof of his reality—though intense desire seems to call him to us. It all begins with the certainty that there is not enough you to solve the problems of life, coupled with an intense yearning for someone who can.
Life does not hold still. It changes; we change; and so, we must ever renew our surrender to Christ. Yesterday’s faith is not today’s surrender. We must repeatedly call to, even cry out for, Augustine’s “You” until
Christ your life appears,
then you too will appear with him in glory (Col 3:4).
