Memorial of St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
Many years ago, when I was on retreat, my retreat director made a simple suggestion. When you pray, he said, put your hands on your forehead, and hold your prayer there, in your head. Then after a while, move your hands down to your chest, over your heart, and hold them there. Take your time. Finally, when the time seems right, move your hands down to your belly, and hold your prayer in your gut.
I still find that a powerful prayer practice. It’s a way of experiencing that God longs for me to bring all of me into our relationship—what I do and don’t understand, what I long for, cherish, or fear, and all the deep, messy stuff I don’t even like to acknowledge. God wants it all.
This memory surfaced when I sat with today’s readings. Today is the feast of St. Augustine, one of the greatest teachers in our tradition and patron saint of our Augustinian Pope Leo. Augustine gave us the story of his conversion in his magnificent Confessions, a book I heartily recommend. Son of a pagan father and a devoutly Christian mother, he was enrolled as a catechumen in childhood but not baptized.
He spent much of his youth and young adulthood restlessly seeking a purpose to ground his life. He tried promiscuous sex and partying but finding that unsatisfying he settled down with one mistress, to whom he remained faithful for fifteen years and with whom he had a much-loved son, Adeodatus (“given by God”).
He tried Manicheanism, a then popular religion which held that the universe is locked in an eternal struggle between the good spiritual world and the evil material world but found no lasting peace there. He tried neo-Platonic philosophy, then cutting edge, which taught that the Good is completely transcendent and beyond all description or thought, but found that unsatisfactory too. After all, he found his love for his mistress and son to be good, and what would Neo-Platonism say about that? Thanks to St. Ambrose, he finally found what he was seeking in Christianity, in Jesus who is both human and divine, and was baptized, along with his son.
So what does this have to do with today’s readings?
Paul’s Corinth was a rambunctious place, full of restless energy and people on the make. Multiple factions jostled up against each other, with competing visions of what one could stake one’s life on. The Jews of Corinth insisted on demonstrations of power as at the Exodus as evidence of God’s action (“signs”), while the Greeks and other pagans wanted elegant, satisfying philosophy (‘wisdom”). Paul offers instead a paradoxical and scandalous vision: Christ crucified. How can failure and a shameful death possibly be seen as a sign of God’s presence and action?
What saves us, Paul is saying, is neither raw power nor elegant philosophy. What saves us is love—a love so profound it will do anything, endure anything, rather than abandon us.
To experience such a love, even fleetingly, is life-changing. It begets in us a desire to love back in the same way. We, of course, are not God, so we can never return that love perfectly. Even the wise virgins in Jesus’s parable of waiting for the bridegroom fell asleep, after all. But we can always desire to love back as we are loved, and with God’s help we can keep trying again every time we falter.
Head, to heart, to gut. Feel my own desire to love back as I am loved and pray for God’s grace to keep trying.
—Margot LeBreton Merz