To Milan I Came

“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” — Romans 10:17 (KJV)

“To Milan I came, to Ambrose the Bishop, known to the whole world as among the best of men.” Augustine was about thirty. Ambrose was the most important church leader in northern Italy, and he welcomed this young African professor warmly. “That man of God received me as a father.” Augustine started to love him, but not because he believed what Ambrose taught. He loved him because Ambrose was kind to him.

So he went to hear Ambrose preach every Sunday, purely as a professional, to judge whether his speaking lived up to the hype. He cared about style, not content. But you can't take in a man's words and keep out his meaning. “And while I opened my heart to admit 'how eloquently he spake,' there also entered 'how truly he spake'; but this by degrees.”

Ambrose showed him that Old Testament stories which had seemed crude or absurd could be read more deeply. He often repeated Paul's words, “The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.” Augustine discovered something else too: the Church did not teach that God has a human-shaped body, which the Manichees had always mocked it for. He writes that “with joy I blushed at having so many years barked not against the Catholic faith, but against the fictions of carnal imaginations.” He had spent a decade attacking a cartoon.

He longed to talk to Ambrose properly, but he never got the chance. Crowds of people with problems always surrounded the bishop. Any spare moments Ambrose spent reading, and Augustine noticed something that amazed him: Ambrose read silently. He watched how “his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest.” Augustine and his friends would sit quietly watching him read, then leave without daring to interrupt.

Augustine left the Manichees, but he didn't become a Christian yet. He decided to stay a catechumen, someone learning the faith, “till something certain should dawn upon me.” He began to see how much he already took on trust: history, faraway cities, the word of friends and doctors, and even “of what parents I was born, which I could not know, had I not believed upon hearsay.” Believing was not the opposite of thinking. Everyone did it.

Then Monica arrived. She had crossed the sea after him, and when a storm frightened the sailors she comforted them, sure that God had promised her a safe arrival. When Augustine told her he was no longer a Manichee, she was calm. She told him “She believed in Christ, that before she departed this life, she should see me a Catholic believer.”

In Africa, Monica used to bring cakes, bread and wine to the shrines of the martyrs. Ambrose had banned the custom in Milan, partly because some people got drunk at it. When the doorkeeper told her, she gave it up at once, without arguing. Ambrose, for his part, kept praising her to Augustine and congratulating him on having such a mother, “not knowing what a son she had in me.”

Sometimes the person who moves you toward God doesn't win an argument. They are just kind to you, and you keep showing up. And sometimes what you're rejecting about Christianity isn't Christianity at all, but a cartoon of it you picked up somewhere.

One thing to do this week: pick one thing about Christianity you've always found hard to accept. Before you decide again, find out what the church actually teaches about it: ask a pastor, or read a careful explanation, not a mocking summary from someone who never read it.