Reflections on St. Augustine's Confessions

We all yearn for God but continually fail to recognize it.

For, if God is love and love is light, as light is truth and happiness; we are all seeking God. The medium of search is different for us all but as this world has taught us to find happiness in the norms we recognize, we are blinded to the true reality that everything is aberrant to Truth.

Saint Augustine said: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

St. Augustine found, as he thrust himself into situational norm for many in today's world during his conversion and blessed receiving of the gift of faith, that what he was encountering 'in the world', - albeit, more than 1600 years ago - did not give him ultimate fulfillment. And therefore, in blind opposition to relativism he noted it was not making those around him joyous either.

Early in Confessions Saint Augustine writes, in clear observation at the travesty of the human clasp to worldly value and the difficulties to overcome it:

"But how one must condemn the river of human custom! Who can stand firm against it? When will it ever dry up? How long will it continue to sweep the sons of Eve into the huge and fearful ocean which can scarcely be passed even by those who have the mark of the Cross upon their sails?"

So what step must we take to go against the grain and become 'not of this world' and yet, 'in this world'? Must we alienate those we know and the values they hold dear, the customs we hold and/or the way we allocate our time? Is it important to continually recognize fault in ourselves? In others?

And once we buy into the idea of ultimate and utter fulfillment in the Lord, what of the struggle to change our lives that have grown accustomed to the ways of this world?

In clear response, struggle will be ever-apparent living for God and while allowing the Holy Spirit to work through you. Yet, the importance is not in our comfort but in our opportunity and grace-filled attempt to bring others to what we have found; a disregard for the disgusting acquisition of injustice toward our Lord, which places importance on the pleasures of this world and rather, a genuine embrace of opposition to the institution and destination for the world to come.

Furthermore, the way to God is not easy. The way of God is not easy. And the discovery of God is not easy. For, as we come into a relationship, through prayer and genuine unassigned penance, we find that changing the person we grew into as a 'heathen' of society is painful beyond belief. Often you will ask: why is the life in the image of Christ so pain-filled and wretched? And yet, do not look to a life through God as a comfort to the 'evils' of this world. Embrace the cross that Christ took up and embrace your own cross, created not by God by what you have come to know and created by your own self.