Good Morning Digitial Neighbors! Happy Monday ADD Irregulars, WSN Cultivators, Friends & Refugees, Phamily & Misfits and all the rest of you Seekers, Wanderers and Lingering on Locals.
In Cath-O-landia we celebrate the feast of St. Augustine one of the great minds & hearts of the Church. Much of my childhood and young adult years knew only of an often maligned Augustine, he was portrayed or spoken of in some of the most negative terms; guilt-ridden and obsessed with sex. He was talked about with little appreciation of his story.
Those tainted windows into the mystery of his person are partially accurate, he did feel guilty about his licentious past. He knew how much time he wasted and how much of his life he recked with a past of wanton indiscretion. He was not one to brag about his wild days, but rather see them of times of greater selfishness and personal emptiness. His regrets came out in dire warnings as one who almost totally ruined his life. Too many of us moderns with our own stories of indiscretion don't want some one to make us question that we ever made any bad choices in our stupid years. Augustine was not one to give himself a pass, he was going assess his life and speak of it honestly and humbly.
It is too easy to forget he was one of the intellectual giants of his day and a master of rhetoric. He had settled on the dualism of the day in the form of Manicheism which was a variant of Zoroastrianism with a mingling of other religions in a syncretistic way. It answered his questions about life and gave him the life he wanted for many years. He was a master of arguments and debates and took as much pride in dismantling his opponents as a he did chasing the ladies. It gave him a pride that was for years unassailable. It was his meeting with Ambrose and the prayers of his mother, Monica, that open his eyes and his heart. Ambrose was a person of intellectual prowess capable of answering Augustine's objections and giving him unsettling questions in return. Monica never stopped praying for her son to find the path to God.
Malign Augustine all you want, in fact the more we do the more we know he has gotten to us, unsettled us, made us look at our selves in less than flattering ways. As much as we might want to focus on the part of his person and teachings we find distasteful and off-putting, he is the doctor of grace. It is grace that saved Augustine, it is grace that transformed him, it was grace that took his passions and directed them to their true fulfillment. Grace, not just some superficial reality for Augustine, it is the gift and power of God lovingly given to transform the lead of our lives in the gold of our adoption.
Augustine knew that the Christ did not meet us on the high road of sanctity, no the Master found the lost, broken and recked on the forgotten and ill traveled paths of life. Christ picked up those robbed, beaten and stripped of dignity by life and bathed their wounds, carried them to a place of refuge and provided for their needs. The Christ Augustine knows is not the one he is often accused of proclaiming, it is our age that is dishonest about Augustine and his message.
YOU ARE CHRIST
You are Christ,
my Holy Father,
my Tender God,
my Great King,
my Good Shepherd,
my Only Master,
my Best Helper,
my Most Beautiful and my Beloved,
my Living Bread,
my Priest Forever,
my Leader to my Country,
my True Light,
my Holy Sweetness,
my Straight Way,
my Excellent Wisdom,
my Pure Simplicity,
my Peaceful Harmony,
my Entire Protection,
my Good Portion,
my Everlasting Salvation.
Christ Jesus, Sweet Lord,
why have I ever loved,
why in my whole life
have I ever desired anything except You,
Jesus, my God?
Where was I when I was not in spirit with You?
Now, from this time forth,
do you, all my desires, grow hot,
and flow out upon the Lord Jesus:
run… you have been tardy until now;
hasten where you are going;
seek Whom you are seeking.
O, Jesus may he who loves You
not be an anathema;
may he who loves You
not be filled with bitterness.
O, Sweet Jesus,
may every good feeling that is fitted for Your praise,
love You, delight in You, adore You!
God of my heart,
and my Portion, Christ Jesus,
may my heart faint away in spirit,
and may You be my Life within me!
May the live coal of Your Love
grow hot within my spirit
and break forth into a perfect fire;
may it burn incessantly on the altar of my heart;
may it glow in my innermost being;
may it blaze in hidden recesses of my soul;
and in the days of my consummation
may I be found consummated with You!
Amen.
And finally his most famous passage of conversion
Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.
Happy Monday and thanks for stopping here on your daily rounds about the internet.
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
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XIII
The Proud Minister
One day there came into the Garden a man in torn clothes badly bruised and cut, who said to the Lover, “In the name of the Beloved I demand your help.”
So the Lover and the Disciple let him in and dressed his wounds and prepared the best of the vegetables from the Garden for him to eat. When his wounds had been dressed and he had eaten and rested the Lover asked him how he had fallen into this plight, to which the man replied, “I was Minister of the Beloved in a city near this place, where I preached His gospel and expounded His doctrine to the people. I pointed out to them how their sins had made them wholly hateful to the Beloved and how therefore they were utterly beyond the range of His love and He would condemn them to eternal torments, whereon some fell into despair and wept bitterly but many were angry. One day the magistrates called me before them and begged me to leave the city and preach elsewhere for they said I had made many people so angry and desperate that they feared there might be a riot and they might not be able to protect me but that I might suffer some injury. I, however, very zealous for the Beloved and believing that the magistrates only feared that their own sins might be proclaimed, preached the more vehemently, denounced the magistrates and made it abundantly clear that the whole wicked city was foredoomed to eternal punishment by the just provision of the Beloved. Whereon a mob, stirred up no doubt by the corrupt and venal magistrates, fell upon me with sticks and stones, nearly killing me and driving me out of the city in the state in which I came to you.”
“My friend,” said the Lover, “this was not a good deed of yours, for besides denying the unfathomable compassion of the Beloved, you have by your obstinacy caused these people to commit a grievous sin, and this cannot be pleasing to the Beloved, that through you who profess to be His minister the people should become worse. Surely you remember that He Himself said, ‘If they persecute you in one city flee to another.’”
Therefore the man was very angry, and cursing the Lover, said, “I see that I have had a very false report of you and I do not believe that you are a servant of the Beloved at all. When I came to you so injured for the Beloved’s sake you set before me only herbs and fruits although the garden is full of birds which you could have killed to make me a worthy meal. I shall proclaim everywhere that you are no true servant of the Beloved but a mere falterer who dares not suffer in the cause of the Beloved. Be sure that you are foreordained to eternal torments who suffer nothing here.”
For the man was so blinded by his own pride that he could not perceive the scars on the hands and feet and the brows of the Lover nor how the cloth beneath the armpits of his tunic was dyed with a red dye. So he went out of the Garden cursing and shouting.
But the Lover looked sad and said, “A man like this does much harm to the cause of the Beloved, for by thus speaking falsely about the Beloved he may bring men to fear Him but none to love Him, and by love alone can any man approach the Beloved.”
