Reflection for the First Sunday of Advent

Most of us are familiar with the basic details of the life of St. Augustine of Hippo, the “bad boy” who became a saint. In case you are not, let me give you a brief sketch of his early life.

Augustine was born about 40 years after the Emperor Constantine decriminalized Christianity. His mother, Monica, was a Christian. His father was a Roman citizen, a pagan, who had high hopes for his son. As a boy, Augustine was prone to all sorts of mischief and needed to be bailed out of jail on more than one occasion by his father. He rejected his father’s plans for him to enter politics and chose to pursue a career as a philosopher and teacher of rhetoric. Augustine took a mistress and fathered a son outside of marriage. He delved into the various religious movements of his time – what we would consider today to be “new age” religious movements – and looked to every new idea, every new pleasure, to fill the empty ache he was deeply aware of in his own soul.

On a fateful day, as Augustine sat in a garden consumed by his own emptiness and the conflicting passions that ruled his life, he heard the voice of a child coming over the garden wall. “Take and read”, sang the child in a sing-song voice over and over again. By his side was a copy of Paul’s epistle to the Romans. He picked it up and read the very words we heard proclaimed in this church today, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provisions for the desires of the flesh.” Augustine tells us in his Confessions that, when he read these words, it was like lightning struck him. From that moment on, he would never be the same. He was baptized and later became the man who we would know as one of the four major Doctors of the Latin Church.

Which just proves something Oscar Wilde would say many centuries later, “The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

Augustine’s story has a universal appeal in that all of us, at one time or another, have felt a profound emptiness in our souls, a “restlessness” with life as we know it. Like Augustine is his early days, some lose themselves in work, career, or ambition. Others get lost in meaningless relationships and sexual immorality. Others to substance abuse, or turn to religious and psychological movements that promise a quick fix for what ails them. In one way or another, we have all blinded ourselves to the truth which Augustine learned the hard way, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts will be restless until they rest in You.”

Advent reminds us sinners that we, too, have a future, no matter how far we’ve gone astray or low we’ve sunk. “The Son of Man comes at an hour unexpected.” The day will come when Christ will appear as judge of the living and the dead. But that day is not today. Today, He comes as Savior. He came unexpectedly to Augustine in the voice of child singing “take and read.” He comes unexpectedly to us, too; in the stirring of conscience that urges us to set something right in our life, in quiet moments of prayer, in the call to give of ourselves to others without regard to what’s in it for us. In spite of the many ways we make ship-wreck of our souls, Christ’s coming as Savior assures us that we are worth saving; that we are deeply and eternally loved.

Do you have a restless ache in your soul? Yes? Good. We all do, and thank God we do. We all long for something better, life-giving, and enduring. What is transitory and false cannot fill a space meant for what is eternal and true, no matter how hard we try. Only Christ can fill our emptiness, and He fills it with Himself.

This Advent, throw open the doors of your life to Christ. He, indeed, comes at an unexpected hour, not to judge, but to save. That hour is now for those who eagerly wait for Him with the restless longing of their hearts. Advent assures us of this.