Cassiacum is a place near Milan. A person I’m going to briefly talk about went there to prepare for his baptism. A person who had a rather deviant adolescence, in which he let himself be blindly carried away by human and worldly passions. He also belonged to various sects and religions. A person endowed with great imagination and extraordinary intelligence. He had a heart, as they say, restless. A heart always searching for truth.
The Bible, a gift from his mother Monica, was a book that he always kept well forgotten in his library. This gentleman, in one of his works called Confessions, perhaps the most famous, tells that, having already overcome various problems by having found answers to his questions (I’m summarizing the story a great deal), and with only the decisive crisis remaining (he found it very difficult to detach himself from his past life), he heard a child’s voice in a neighboring house saying to him: take and read. Understanding it as an invitation from God, he took the Bible, opened it to Paul’s letters (Rom 13:13-14), and read:
let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.
Summarizing and “argentinizing” this lived moment, we would say that these words were a direct blow to the neck (in Argentina we say: palazo directo a la nuca).
Some time ago an American made known a personal opinion about the 100 best writers in history. It was a list headed by William Shakespeare, where Jorge Luis Borges was also included, as well as this person I’m talking about. Unfortunately, after searching extensively in Clarín (where the article was), I couldn’t find it.
Anyway, his name was Augustine, also known as Augustine of Hippo, or Saint Augustine. He was a great Catholic saint. If you want to continue investigating this man’s life, I’ll leave you two links:
How many of you thought that a saint could have this profile? How many thought they were people with nothing else to do but pray, read the Bible… and knew nothing else? Is it necessary to go back 1600 years to find such a person (Saint Augustine was born in the year 354)? No. Observe and read about the life of Pope John Paul II. Why do you think they call this gentleman John Paul the Great?
Well, if the post had been dedicated to Saint Augustine it would have had another title. This past weekend I was doing a retreat: the Cassiacum (and yes… it couldn’t have another name). The truth is that it was very good. It’s an impact retreat, which has much more effect on people who never approached Christ, or the Church. People who when they hear “Jesus”, or “God”, or “Church”, what they hear on television and from society itself comes to mind. An idea very (but very) far from reality. I was once that type of person. Anyway, people who for years were being invited by their boyfriends/girlfriends, friends and acquaintances, who always had an excuse not to go because it didn’t appeal to them, because it was boring… because they were afraid of how they were going to come out of there.
Sometimes, when one watches a movie, and hears the protagonist deliver a rather long speech but without any waste, profound words that are savored from the first to the last, one thinks that this is quite impossible in reality… because the script was perfectly studied and refined. However, this Sunday, at the closing mass of Cassiacum No. 34, I heard those words from the mouth of, if I’m not mistaken, Agustina. It was clear that it was something that was born from the depths of her heart, with total sincerity.
The kids who come out of that retreat and who entered under the conditions I mentioned before (never went to mass, never read the Bible, the Church is synonymous with crazy people, etc), come out euphoric. And why? One of the boys said, finishing the retreat, that he felt partly bad, because he knew that later he would have to return to everyday life. He wondered, with an annoyed tone, why society couldn’t offer what he had received that weekend. Why couldn’t it be a little better?
Why don’t people start asking themselves more questions about their life? Why don’t they doubt things a little more, and more specifically themselves, to understand that one actually knows very little? Why don’t they stop looking for the easy way? How does one become happy? Whatever the answer to that question is: where did I get that from? Who said it’s like that? Is it right that I keep doing that? Did I reflect on it deeply? Won’t it have catastrophic implications for my future? And I say “catastrophic” because anything that ruins my happiness is disastrous.
All these “crazy” things are about that: seeking truth. Seeking wisdom. Seeking happiness. Who doesn’t like to love and be loved, to feel good, fulfilled? But do I really seek them? Or do I let myself be carried away by what others say? The people who this weekend did this retreat knew that something was missing within their being. And mind you, there were people from all walks of life: fanatic footballers from Unión and Colón, people who had no problems materially, kids who couldn’t enjoy the presence of their parents (or one of them), who had a very dark childhood, medical students (accustomed to understanding some things through the microscope or science), musicians, etc etc etc. All back with a spirit renewed and changed by God.
I hope, then, that people start changing that conformist, lazy and easily manipulable heart for a more awake one, for a more restless one, like Saint Augustine’s.