St. Augustine

St. Augustine
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.com – Memorial of St. Augustine, Sat., Aug. 28th, 2010

“The saints are like older brothers and sisters to us in the family of God. They want to take us by the hand and lead us. They encourage us to say: “If this or that person can do it, why can’t I?”

These are the words St. Augustine thought he heard at the time of his conversion, and they were among the last encouragements he needed for risking the leap into faith and into God’s love.

“Throughout the centuries, there has been hardly another saint who has remained as close to us, as understandable, as Saint Augustine. In his writings, we encounter all the depths and heights of the human spirit, all the questioning and seeking and searching that we also experience today.

“Not without reason has he been called the first modern man. Nietzsche once said he could not abide Saint Augustine – he seemed too plebian and common. There is some justification for Nietzsche’s attitude, but it is precisely in these qualities that we discover Saint Augustine’s true Christian greatness.

“He could have been an aristocrat of the spirit, but for the sake of Christ and for the sake of his fellow men, in whom he saw Christ coming toward him, he left the ivory tower of the gifted intellectual in order to be wholly man among men, a servant of the servants of God.

“For the sake of Christ he emptied himself of his great learning. For the sake of Christ he became increasingly and ordinary person and the servant of all. In doing so he became truly a saint.

“For Christian holiness does not consist in being superhuman and in having an extraordinary talent or greatness that others do not have. Christian holiness is simply the obedience that puts us at God’s disposal wherever he calls us. – (The above taken from the Meditation for August 28th).

Christians in the World – (Meditation for August 27th)

“We have lost sight of the fact that Christians cannot live like “everyone else”. The foolish notion that there is no specifically Christian morality is merely one way of saying that a fundamental concept has been lost: the “distinctively Christian” as opposed to the models offered by the “world”.

“Even religious orders and congregations have confused true reform with a relaxation of the traditional austerity previously practiced. They have confused renewal with comfort.

“To give a small but concrete example: a religious reported to me that the downfall of his monastery began very concretely with the declaration that it was “no longer practical” for the religious to rise during the night to recite the nocturnal office… The religious replaced this uncontested but significant “sacrifice” by staying up late at night to watch television…

“But the present-day decline of the indispensible austerity of Christian life, beginning with the religious orders, is composed of just such “minor matters”. Christians must realize today more than ever before that the belong to a minority and are in opposition to all that appears good, natural, and logical, to what the New Testament calls “the spirit of the world”. Cardinal Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth- Meditations for Every Day… 1992
George H. Kubeck OPL