Note: On Tuesdays and some Sundays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
He was thirty-one when he converted to Christianity. He had already fathered a child with a woman not his wife, and sent her away because he had plans to marry a very young heiress. He was 
a brilliant scholar and a well-connected teacher. He had a mother who wouldn’t stop talking to him about Jesus and who he often ignored and avoided, and a mentor, St. Ambrose, whose eloquence on the topic ultimately perhaps moved him as much as his mother’s entreaties did.
Augustine’s life up until that was, shall we say, untidy. Disordered. Self-focused. The inside of the cup was grimy and gritty. Afterward… well, it was different. He was baptized, ordained, and named a bishop in the space of eight years. For the rest of his life, Augustine was one of the greatest defenders of the faith, often using his own story as a sign of the Lord’s mercy.
Sometimes, like the Pharisees and scribes Jesus castigates in Matthew 23:25-26, we focus on the outside of our cup… Mass attendance, check. Tithing, check. Time spent in service, check. To the world, we may look like uber-Christians, saintly almost, worthy of imitation. But we know better. We know our lives are like Augustine’s even after his conversion, full of challenges and struggles and temptations to focus on shiny-ing up our exterior. May we be receptive to all the messengers the Lord sends to help us scrub the interior… because unless we do that on a regular basis, the outside doesn’t matter.
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