Augustine, Grace, and True Love

Today is the feast day in which we honor our father in the faith, the great Doctor of Grace, Saint Augustine of Hippo. A man of unmatched influence in the life of our Church, he remains the great Prodigal Son of early Christianity.

Today I was fortunate enough to attend the Diocese of Harrisburg Religious Education Director/Coordinator Convocation and we were blessed to celebrate Mass with Father Edward Quinlan, Diocesan Secretary for Education.

In his homily, Father Quinlan gave the usual biographical highlights of St. Augustine's life but he then turned to a rather beautifully simple point - something that really helps to understand the saint's great bout with Pelagius about, amongst other things, the nature of grace.

Pelagius famously taught that we were essentially able to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and reach God the Father. But Father Quinlan pointed to the profound lessons Augustine had learned in his own life that had given him a very different view.

You see, Augustine had been a great sinner. He was a man who had looked in every nook and cranny he could find searching for fulfillment, meaning, and value. Yet all he found was pain, unhappiness, and an ever increasing emptiness he could never fill. His life was like the proverbial barrel with a hole in the bottom that one tries hopelessly to fill, only to find it emptying over and over again.

But then something happened. As Augustine frames it in addressing God, "Our hearts were made for You, O Lord... and they are restless until they rest in You." He understood that GOD HAD FOUND HIM - not the other way around. He knew firsthand the dramatic, ungraspable grace of the Father in Heaven which is His alone to give. Our role is to assent - to humble ourselves and to receive willingly the gift.

Real love is always a gift! Love, joy, happiness cannot be taken. They are beyond the reach of the one who seeks to take hold of them on his own terms apart from the One from whom they come.

This is a beautiful lesson for us today, I think. This world is filled with voices promising us that if we just WANT hard enough, if we DESIRE with our whole being, we can have anything we want. Maybe Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said it best when he said, "The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness."

Open our mind, our hearts, our souls O Lord that we may receive every grace that comes from you with a spirit of humility! Amen.