For Christmas, Fr. Markey gave me a
biography of Saint Augustine, which I recently started and have found difficult
to put aside. Who knew a forty-five year
old book about a North African Bishop who lived seventeen hundred years ago
could be so engaging?
I am also in the middle of another
biography, this one a long audiobook that I “borrow” from the library when I am
going to be able to listen to it in my car. It examines the life of U. S. Air Force
General Bernard Schreiver, of whom I had never heard before I found this
available for download. Why spend so
much time on someone of whom I had never even heard? To learn who he was, and why what he did was
important.
There are few subjects more
interesting than a human life, fully lived and carefully examined. Sometimes the historic impact of a life can disguise
our lack of knowledge of the person, and personality, as I am learning from the
Augustine book. This seminal thinker in
Western Christianity -- the author of Confessions
and City of God, influence on
Catholic moral teaching, author of the Rule of St Augustine, whose strengths
and weaknesses magnified by his influence arguably precipitated the split in
western Christianity by their effect on one other individual soul, the Augustinian
priest Martin Luther -- was just one guy.
All this echoes in my head on a
weekend I cannot stop calling Washington
Holiday. I know the bureaucracy
relabeled it years ago with a more generic title acknowledging all forty-five
presidents, with perhaps a grudging nod to the first and the sixteenth. But last weekend I was mentally marking
Lincoln’s birthday, and this week, it is George Washington whose life I cannot
relinquish to some class or category.
This one man, this one life, is the
sine qua non of the entire “American
experiment:” the nation in which we live and the Constitution that governs
us. His personal virtue, military
achievement, and executive fortitude all made this country happen in a way that
stands above the contribution of any other individual. That is true even before you take into
account his unique act of freely and willingly laying down executive power, on
schedule. This precedent defines our
nation to our own day – indeed, even unto last month. I cannot be convinced that it is not
necessary annually to celebrate this president among presidents.
As I continue to drive and listen
to the life and work of General Schreiver, I find another example of what
General Washington’s selflessness made possible: a nation where the innate
value and potency of every human life can achieve fulfillment, for the good not
only of the individual and his intimates, but for the good of the entire
nation. And this flowering and
fulfillment is best determined and directed by the individual himself. This is radical stuff, as a wise observer
once noted.
I have read biographies aplenty of
George Washington, and would not be surprised if I were to enjoy more in coming
years. Pushing past the legends and
legacy of the Father of His Country to the find the man himself leaves me in
wonder that this was just one guy. Similarly delightful is discovering the full
humanity of the monumental Father of the Church, Augustine.
It is in examining this not
diminutive, but fully familiar humanity that I also see what each of these
greats has in common with … me. And you. And the neighbor, and our parents, and the
kids, and the person across the aisle on Metro.
It bears recognizing and rejoicing that the possibility of achievement
that is open for our lives stands firmly on the shoulders of these full and
faithful lives that have given us so much.
How better to reawaken that, than
by reading a good biography?
Monsignor
Smith
