8/28/2016 – Reflection on St. Augustine on his feast day

         August 28 is normally the feast day of St Augustine, but because it falls on a Sunday this year, it is not recognized in our liturgical calendar.  Nonetheless, as a priest, I owe a great deal of gratitude to St Augustine, one of the great theologians and leaders in the history of our faith.  So I want to include a short reflection on him on my blog today.  St. Augustine was the Bishop of Hippo in present-day Algeria in the early 5th century.  He is a doctor of the Church, an accolade only accorded to a select group of 36 men and women throughout Church history.  He is considered one of the most influential theologians in the history of the faith, even though he died almost 1600 years ago in the year 430. 

         What makes Augustine such a popular saint in our own modern era is the fact that as a young man, before he converted to the faith, he tried to live a very worldly life according to a philosophy that was popular in the secular world of his era, Manicheanism, a totally rational religion & philosophy that saw our world divided by 2 principles: good & evil.  Augustine came to our faith influenced by the prayers and Christian faith of his mother, St. Monica, and the eloquent preaching of St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan.  

         Augustine’s spent a great deal of time reconciling faith & reason, something that perhaps many in our secular world today fail to understand today.  Augustine states – “I believe in order that I may understand” – showing us that believing helps pave the way for us to enter into the threshold of truth.  But Augustine also is able to state – “I understand, so the better to believe” – showing us how the believer is called to scrutinize and examine the truth in order to find God along our journey, in order to truly believe.  Many of us still struggle with a balance of faith and reason in our lives as we try to grow in our faith, following in the footsteps of Augustine and many of the other early Church fathers. 
           We also struggle with a lot of divisions in our modern Church today, just like Augustine did.  Like Augustine, many of us also struggle to live out our faith against a secular world that seems to have a different agenda and a different system of values.  May we remember the words of hope that Augustine prayed: “God of life, there are days when the burdens we carry chafe our shoulders and wear us down; when the road seems dreary and endless, the skies gray and threatening; when our lives have no music in them and our hearts are lonely, and our souls have lost their courage. Flood the path with light, we beseech you; turn our eyes to where the skies are full of promise.”