Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is already the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone; the day is near. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us walk decently as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires (Romans 13:11-14).

He was the best and brightest. In the European power city of fourth century Milan, Italy, young Augustine had success wrapped. A brilliant orator who combined exquisite rhetorical skill with penetrating reason, aspiring lawyers and politicians sought out his tutelage for the skills they needed. Back then, people got higher education through free agents like him, and business boomed with commensurate connections. His charisma and outgoing nature drew many friends. Like all promising young men in Milan, he had a common law wife and a son he adored. Augustine had it made. 

But he was restless. A master of persuasion, he knew that the impressions of unassailable truth that he and his pupils left on the hearts of audiences were, in fact, just that, mere impressions. Perhaps being a philosopher at heart, a lover of wisdom, did not square with his career as a rhetorician. The truth and the impression too often lack congruence, and he felt a desperate longing for truth.

He admired the facts that astronomers bring into focus with their telescopes and equations. But he had another level of truth in mind, a truth to ground his love, a truth for which love whetted his appetite. The words of great stylists like Cicero and  Ambrose intimated it, but left him with questions. He turned to a popular religious sect, the Manicheans, who divided reality into the evil material realm and the good spiritual realm, promoting a pure lifestyle. But when he got to know Manichean teachers better, they seemed to muddle through their days as caught up in survival mode as anyone else. 

Meanwhile, Augustine’s mother, Monica, made herself ever present. Unlike his father, a practical, pagan, Roman civil servant, his Christian mother wanted nothing more than to see her son baptized. Yet, she was also a social climber who wanted him to marry into the aristocracy. She arranged a betrothal, and he left his common law wife with a level of anguish that surprised him at himself. Yet again, this unofficial divorce comported with the ways of promising young men in Milan. But Augustine’s great heart made plenty of room for passion along with reason.

Some joke that Augustine’s most famous quotation from his Confessions – the world’s first autobiography and possibly longest written prayer – was, “Give me chastity and self-restraint, but not yet.” In retrospect, Augustine saw lust as his greatest hindrance to faith, and his struggles over this read like the confessions of an addict. But actually his sexual adventures appear tame by today’s standards and normal by the standards of 4th Century Milan. His struggles with lust are extraordinary not so much for his sexual escapades as his sensitive conscience.

In any case, one thing after another kept nudging the proud but restless, urging young Augustine to wake up to a life less dominated by lust and ambition. Mourning the death of a dear friend who once chastened his insolent mockery of Christian belief. The example of a more seasoned and distinguished orator who stunned Milan with a public conversion. The guidance of a Christian spiritual mentor. Monica’s patient persistence. And most of all, the surprising discovery of the inexhaustible riches of scripture. The Bible that once seemed so inferior to Cicero’s stylistic flair now held a fascination like no other literature.

Intellectually, Augustine painstakingly ruled out alternatives to Christian faith. This left him spiritually naked before God. Except for a kind friend who accompanied him, any onlooker would have thought him mad with all the tears and trembling. They walked together to a quiet garden with only the sounds of children squealing and chattering nearby. Someone had left their old Bible on a small table. Then a child’s voice rose above the clamor, singing, “Pick it up and read! Pick it up and read!” 

Perhaps the child had in mind a scavenger hunt clue or a puppy love note. But the words hurtled through the trees like a ball lobbed his way in a game of catch. With trembling hands, Augustine picked up the Bible, opened it, and read Paul’s words to the Roman church, “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans 13:13b-14)

At that moment, Augustine woke up and let it all go. Not that the old temptations stopped, but he knew to walk past them whenever they stepped in his path on his walk home. Home to God. His truly most famous quotation sums up the Confessions on the first page: “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (as translated by T. S. Eliott). 

Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, went on to a career as a church leader and as the theologian who addressed the crises and opportunities that came with the fall of Rome. Philosophers and their students still wrestle with his writings on free will and determinism, the problem of evil, and other topics. His influence on western thought is so great that you are very likely an Augustinian thinker yourself, even if unawares.

Yet, he wrote the Confessions as a pastoral gift to his people. For the story of the best and brightest is also the story of ordinary folks like you and me. Our lust, ambition, acquisitiveness, competitiveness, envy, vanity, wealth, careerism, status symbols, and even sense of our basic righteousness are at best temporary shelters, at worst distractions and detours on our restless trek home. 

In keeping with Paul and Christ in their urging to keep awake because the time is nigh, Augustine himself used the metaphor of sleeping and waking. All the distractions and detours we pursue in key-ed up restlessness keep us spiritually asleep. We barely recognize our desire to wake up and live with God. Augustine likened his pre-conversion struggles to pull toward the immediate pleasure of melting into the bed and the natural push to wake up to another day. Convinced that God bid him to wake up to a new life, he confessed that, nevertheless, he “had no answer whatever except the sluggish, drowsy words, ‘Just a minute,’ ‘One more minute,’ ‘Let me have a little longer.’ But these ‘minutes’ never diminished, and (a) ‘little longer’ lasted inordinately long.”

Let me take the metaphor another step: The sleeping do not know that they sleep. But the restless know that they are restless. If you think you have arrived, you are probably dreaming. But if you remember that Jesus blessed, not the satisfied, but those who hunger and thirst for right relationship with God, if you let the words of God address you and listen for God’s leading in the company of friends and playing children, if you pray even as you know precious little to Whom you pray, God will disturb your sleep. And you will be ready to rise to a new day.

Advent is the season when we remember Christ’s invitation for all seasons to wait for him, to be watchful for his coming, to be attentive to his presence. We are well aware of the future tense, that we hope for a coming that will culminate history as we know it and usher in eternal joy we cannot fathom. But in Jesus’s emphatic caution that we cannot know in advance the time of that coming, he bids us to a spiritual attention now, in the present. 

Then in the Apostle Paul’s declaration that we know what time it is, time to wake up and detach from all the distractions and detours that obscure our attention, we hear the bold claim on us that Augustine discovered when he read those verses in the garden. Christ ministers to us now even as we wait for him. He will free us from whatever keeps us from him. Do not delay waking from the comfort of old distractions. Advent is not only a time to wait for Christ’s future coming. It is time to wake up to Christ with us now, to shake off the cobwebs and accept the invitation to follow where he leads.

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Confessions of Augustine: A Gift from a Friend

Cleansing for Life with Augustine and Me

Good Mourning, Augustine: Lessons from Experience

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God (Matthew 5:8).

Image: Fra Angelico, “Conversion of Saint Augustine,” circa 1430-1435, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.