“Tom” is on my mind. As a chaplain, I saw this 26 year old inmate at The House of Correction today. One of my guys who has returned to jail again….

He trudges down the stairs from his cell a little rumpled, carrying a sheet of paper. “Something I wrote for you,” he quips as he sits near me on the metal seats at the table in the cellblock. His square face, dark buzz-cut hair, lips that make funny grimaces when he speaks, broad shoulders which I hit lightly sometimes as we converse, and endearing manner though he robbed his grandmother for drug money, make me love him like one of God’s lost sheep, even though when I walk away I think he may actually be hopeless.

We get increasingly communicative as we spend the half hour together in view of the female Correctional Officer and the other inmates who are milling around. At times he runs back to his cell to get pictures of his family (never shown to me in the past three years) and a book he offers me to read about a guy who carried a full-size crucifix around the world as his mission. Tom tells me he feels like giving up at times as he lays on his bunk with nothing to do. I draw him out about the depression he has spoken about before. Words like “empty” and “lonely” come up. I go for them, ask him about trying to write to his father who is a “mean old guy but I love him.” Tom says his dad is not the kind of guy whom you write your feelings to, this 50 year old truck driver who left his wife when Tom was seven years of age and the oldest of three, the mother a heroin addict and who died soon after. “No wonder you feel an emptiness,” I say, searching for his feelings. He doesn’t show any.
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City of Numbers

Violence in the City of Brotherly Love

“We live in two worlds—they only notice each other when they collide.” The new play about violence at the Interact Theater is worth attending.  Those who are shot to death in Philadelphia and those who shoot them collide these two worlds. The story is told of one young man, who came to Philly last year to be a teacher and was shot to death for his Ipod. It makes one weep. He was white, from Minnesota. His murderer was Black, from a Philly ghetto. Victims and victimizers. Two different worlds. Sometimes.
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But, Why Not Me?

This question, in the mouth of a friend of Augustine’s, is the key to understanding Augustinian Spirituality. In Book Eight of his Confessions, Augustine describes himself in a garden in Milan before he finally took the step to commit himself wholly to Jesus Christ and to be baptized. In one of the most dramatic conversion stories in Christian history, Augustine describes how he is struggling with all of his sexual passions; he can not become chaste as he wishes. While in the midst of this inner struggle, he tells us, “a mighty storm arose in me, bringing a mighty rain of tears.” He leaps up and runs into a remote section of the garden. While sobbing out of control under a fig tree, he hears a child’s voice singing over and over again, Tolle, lege, tolle lege, which means “Pick it up and read it.” Augustine experiences this as a message to him from God. He returns to the bench where he had been reading St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. He seized the book, opened it, and read silently the first text he found: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provisions for the flesh in its concupiscenses. (Romans 13:13) “A light of utter confidence shone in my heart,” he tells us. “All the darkness of uncertainty vanished.”

It is a stunning story, perhaps even polished up to grab our attention and lure us in as we read it. Except for the opening line, there is one significant feature left out of this summary. I believe it to be at the heart of understanding Augustine and Augustinian Spirituality. During this dramatic encounter with God, Augustine’s dear friend, Alypius, was sitting on the garden bench nearby. To ignore this, or to erase the conversation between Augustine and Alypius which followed, is to miss the unique gift to the Church that Augustine and Augustinian Spirituality offers.

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If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times and says, “I repent,” you must forgive him.

Jesus
Luke 17:3-4

God forgives, but (not without) repentance.

Muhammed
The Sayings of Muhammed, 209

The unwillingness to admit that we have been hurt is one of the major impediments to forgiving.

Robert D. Enright, PhD
Forgiveness is a Choice, 2001

If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses.

Jesus
Matthew 6:14-15

People will sometimes forgive you the good you have done them, but seldom the harm they have done you.

W. Somerset Maugham
A Writer’s Notebook, 1949

You saw his weakness, that he’l ne’er forgive.

Friedrich von Schiller
William Tell, 3.1, 1804

Ministers ask: Is it possible for God to forgive Man? And when I think of what has been suffered- of the centuries of agony and tears, I ask: Is it possible for man to forgive God?

Robert Ingersoll
The Foundations of Faith