Friday 7 December - St Ambrose - Wanting to be loved

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Mt 9:27

‘Take pity on us Son of David’

St Augustine’s spiritual journey was a tortuous one. Even though his mother, Monica, brought him up in the Christian faith, though without baptism as was the custom at the time (men were expected to sow their wild oats first), he drifted away from Christianity and explored other beliefs. But none of those beliefs brought him any peace of mind. In the meantime, he became a teacher of rhetoric, the use of Latin in public speaking. However, his students in Rome were reluctant to pay their fees, so he moved to Milan to get a better teaching job. In Milan, he heard that its bishop, Ambrose, who had received a good classical education, was a very good public speaker, so Augustine began to attend his sermons.

As he sat there listening to Ambrose’s careful turn of phrase, something began to happen to Augustine. He began to shift his attention away from the man to the message. The gospels, which Augustine had thought crude and unworthy of too much attention as works of literature, began to speak to his heart. Unaware, probably, that this was happening to him, the tiny voice inside Augustine that echoed that of the blind men in today’s gospel began to surface: ‘Son of David, have pity on me’. At the bottom of Augustine’s restless searching was an unarticulated desire to be loved and forgiven - by God. Listening to Ambrose, whom we remember today, was a significant moment, therefore, on Augustine’s journey to God.

The same is true of all of us. We are all like the blind men. We all want to be able to ‘see’ with the eyes of faith.  We all want to be loved and forgiven, at depth - something which no other human being can do. Let us not be afraid, therefore, to cry out to Jesus for healing, and we will receive it. We will be able to see again, or perhaps for the first time. Or, as Augustine puts it, by loving our neighbour first, we will purify our eye for ‘seeing’ God.

A reflection written by Paul Graham O.S.A., St Joseph's Broomhouse, Edinburgh, Scotland


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