An impressionable young man from a respectable family falls into the wrong crowd. He becomes increasingly estranged from his family and begins exhibiting strange behaviour. While he is away at school his mother’s fears are confirmed. He has become a member of an extreme religious cult. Now this scenario could be straight out of the newspaper today except it happened in the fourth century. Today we know the young man as Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose story is a story of hope and passion: hope because against all the odds he was able to turn his life around completely; passion because Augustine employed the same zeal and fervour to refute the group’s extremist views as he once did to support them.
Any one of us is capable of making bad choices that lead us down the wrong path, seemingly without hope of finding our way back to a way of life we once took for granted. For so many teenagers and young adults the lure may be an abuse of drink or drugs or a sense of belonging that comes with gang affiliation. For adults addictions of various kinds can bring our world crashing down around us in record time. By the grace of God, most of us manage to navigate our way through life with only a few minor detours here and there. Perhaps the greatest challenge we face as Christians, is not to turn our back on individuals whose situations others have judged to be without hope. There are lots of Augustine’s out there today just waiting for us to give them some guidance and direction in life. We can reach out to them with a sense of passion and belief in every individual’s ability to change.
Saint Augustine, pray for us.
Dum Tacet Clamat 