When Saint Augustine went from the extreme anguish which he experienced in the interior conflict between his heart's yearning for eternity and the restraints that his passions and his academic skepticism imposed on him to reading the Word of God, turning to it in order to gain light and direction for his life...he realized that the invisible is the true reality that sustains all else.
...[I]t is just the same with us. In our time the pressure of audio-visual stimuli has, if anything, increased. The loudspeakers and the shouting voices [and the images and messages] of this world have reached such a volume that now we are hardly able to perceive the quiet of God. We often fancy that we have grown wiser and more clever because we take visible reality more seriously, but at the same time we must admit that our hearts have lost their keenness of vision, for we are no longer able to see beyond the visible to the invisible and eternal realities apart from which the visible has no being or subsistence...[God calls us to adore and worship Him and thus] to put our trust in the invisible and to acknowledge that it is the truly foundational reality.
Loosely quoted and paraphrased from the 1965 "Sermon for the Feast of Saint Augustine," Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching, San Francisco: Ignatius, 2011, 264-265.
