At the beginning of the last school year, the principal asked me to teach a new course for the seniors of the school. I said yes, accepting the challenge, above all because in the second semester the program of the course included the Confessions of St. Augustine. The reason is that the Confessions are a fascinating read when you have students searching for the truth. The more I would delve into the narrative, the more I felt within me like the Spirit was using the testimony of Augustine to open the hearts of my students. I want to share three examples.
The first comes from the infancy of Augustine, who returns home after having been punished physically by his companions and bullied. His parents do not acknowledge anything. Rather, they minimize the wound that is present in his soul. And this inattention provokes in him a pain that is greater than the pain caused by the violence itself. Today, many young people are this way, wounded and abandoned. In the essays written by my students, I could witness firsthand this pain of feeling the soul abandoned in its wounds. How painful to live without the possibility of true healing!
The second example is Augustine speaking about the negative influence of some friendships, where the group finds joy in the sufferings of others, or those that even push him to admit that “We were ashamed of being ashamed.” When I read this sentence in class, I sensed the deep silence of someone whose conscience is being laid bare. As if someone had said out loud what everyone was thinking but could not find the courage to say. From that moment, real confessions from some of the students took off, finally admitting how certain groups -where friendship is based on some combination of sex, alcohol or other things- have the strength to make them accept what they know is bad. For this is the great tragedy of friendships based on disordered desires: they lead us to love what hurts us and to be ashamed of what is beautiful and true.
Only the true and living God can burn through time and space to make such a great thing happen
And lastly, obviously, there is the battle of Augustine against lust. While this world thinks that it knows all about sex, about how necessary it is to live a “sexually liberated” life, no one knows then how to escape the demons who enslave us and who are evoked by those passions. As one person wrote to me in those days: “I too, like Augustine, thought that the chains of lust, which kept me shackled to my sexual impulse, would never have been unlocked.”
One day, however, the Lord surprised me beyond anything I could have imagined. At the end of a lesson, a girl asked to speak with me. McKenna is a lively girl, attentive but also a bit shy. She says that she needs to get my signature for some documents for the school. But after I sign them, she bursts into tears. And only at the end of a long moment of tears and silence does she find the courage to say the following to me: “Father, I wanted to tell you that I love God so much. I have never found the courage to ask you, but I already spoke to my parents about it last year. Can you baptize me? I too do not feel complete without God, even if I’ve been afraid to say it to my friends because I was ashamed, just like Augustine.”
And so the academic year finished with the story of the baptism of Augustine and the celebration of that of McKenna! We celebrated the baptism at school, along with her First Communion and Confirmation, joined by a few students as well as her family. From that day forward, my heart has not ceased to be grateful for what I have seen. Because only the true and living God can burn through time and space to make such a great thing happen in the heart of a young girl. Only the Truth can possess us in this way. Since then, I’ve often thought of how true this phrase is in which Augustine speaks of his encounter with Ambrose, just as it is true for myself and McKenna as well: “To him I was guided unknowingly by You, O Lord, to be, by him, guided knowingly to You.”
