I have been extremely miserable in
adolescence, miserable from its very onset, and as I prayed to you for the gift
of chastity I had even pleaded, “Grant me chastity and self-control, but please
not yet.” I was afraid that you might
hear me immediately and heal me forth with of the morbid lust which I was more
anxious to satisfy then to snuff out.-St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 8, Chapter 7
Oh Lord how insightful
this passage is to the human person. So
often we are attached to something that is sinful in our lives and we hate the
enslavement or need to satisfy ourselves, having our happiness subject to
it. However, we love to satisfy the
desire but once the desire is satisfied we become empty once again and wish to
be released into something lasting. It
is this anxiousness to satisfy rather than to snuff out that makes us call out
like St. Augustine, “Lord, grant me to be released from my sinfulness, but not
yet.” We wonder-if we are released,
where will we find our happiness? We
will find it in the love of God shown to us on the cross. There is no greater love than this: that a
person would lay down his life for the sake of his friends (John 15:13). It is only when we find this love that we can
look back at our sinfulness and see how miserable we really were by knowing how
happy we are now, just as Augustine did when he wrote about his
adolescence. If he knew how miserable he was during his adolescence he would not have waited till his thirties before he seeked his happiness in God and said, "Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!" (St. Augustine, Confessions). If we completely understood
our state of misery, then we would waste no time trying to escape our state of
misery. Augustine shows us that it is
never too late or too early to turn to the Lord and ask him to help us love Him
as He loves us and receive the joy and
peace of the Lord.
The
reason why we become so happy when we turn to God for our happiness is because
we do what we were made for, a loving and faithful self-giving relationship with
God. It is only when we do what we are
supposed to by nature that we receive the peace and joy our nature longs and
searches for. You have made us for
yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you (St.
Augustine, Confessions, Book 1, Chapter 1). St.
Augustine and his mother St. Monica, who wept over his soul until he was
converted, pray for us.
New movie going out about St. Augustine. To find out how to get it in your hometown click on the following link The Restless Heart.
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