St. Augustine, immediately after his conversion, wrote these
beautiful words:
Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I
loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I
searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things that you
created. You were there with me, but I was not with you.
The Lord promised to be with us always. And He is. This is
what we learned from catechism: God is everywhere. He is with us. He dwells
among us. He is present.
And yet there are times that we do not experience his
presence. He seemed absent, distant, unconcerned. But this problem of presence
is not with God, but with us. As St. Augustine said, “You were there with me,
but I was not with you.” We do not pray that God may be present to us. We pray
that we may be present to God.
Oftentimes our life is filled with graces and blessings and
yet we fail to be present to them. We fail to see, to recognize and to
experience the richness of our life. God is there, but we are not.
We fill our hearts with restlessness, tiredness,
distraction, anger, jealousy, obsession, wound, haste, worries, anxieties and doubts,
that we think that our lives are nothing but impoverished, dull, small-time,
boring, monotonous, meaningless and hopeless.
All these things make our eyes shut. All these things make
our hearts closed. And so, the Lord says to us in the gospel today, “Ephphata!”
Be opened! Be open to God’s presence, to his blessings, to his grace, to
beauty, to love, to life, to the richness of our life.
God is with us in the sacraments, in the Holy Eucharist, in sacred scriptures, in the Blessed Sacrament, in nature, in our neighbors, in our trials, in our joys, in successes, in our failures. God is with us. Are we with Him? Amen.
