St Augustine

When Augustine heard a child singing, "Take up and read!," thinking that God intended him to hear those words, he picked up the book of the Letters of St Paul, and read the first passage his gaze fell on. It was just what Augustine needed, for in it, St Paul says to put away all impurity and to live in imitation of Christ. That did it! From then on, Augustine began a new life.

The power to change one’s life can come from a paragraph, a lone remark, a single verse. But that is only the climax of various things that could happen in a person's life, as it was the case in St Augustine's dramatic life of transformation.

Through the prayers of his holy mother St Monica and the marvellous preaching of St Ambrose, Augustine was led to the Christian faith, but not without his personal effort and extensive quest for the Truth. Augustine's arrival at faith was not magical, though dramatic; it was a gradual process of allowing God to transform him. In his famous work Confessions, Augustine writes: "Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you. You were with me, but I was not with you. You called, you cried out and you rid me of my deafness." These well-known words of his tell of a deeper understanding of his own conversion, that God is the primary agent of his transformation. The source and end of all transformation is God himself; our lives not just Augustine's can be summarized by these famous and beautiful words of his: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

We can find that rest in the innermost point of our beings. Thomas Merton wrote about this virginal innermost point thus: "At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely."

The Innermost Point in us cannot be lost. But it can be hidden away because of our various distractions as St Augustine's life shows us. In other words, God resides in us; unless we give Him some time and space we won't be able to identify our deep connectedness to Him. As St Augustine would say, God is present to us always and everywhere, but am I present to Him here and now? If a stormy life like that of Augustine could find true peace and rest in God, could touch the core of reality, the person that he was in God’s eyes, how about us? If only we could see the secret beauty of our hearts. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.

As St Augustine's life loudly proclaims, the lives of saints never point to themselves, but always and forever beyond themselves to the One who chose them, uses them and loves them.