Augustine’s book Confessions is a wonderful reflection on the sovereignty of God and the evangelical nature of the gospel. That is to say, in reading in the Confessions, you are steeped in the reality that God will judge every moment of your life. Augustine underlines and highlights this reality throughout the book by writing it as one long prayer to God.
One time I was talking with a friend about the book and he commented that he kept getting caught on the pronoun “you”. He would be reading along and then Augustine would say “you” and my friend said that pronoun would reorient everything: the book is not addressed to the reader but to God. This is true throughout the whole book even up to the end where Augustine writes, “Only you can be asked, only you can be begged, only on your door can we knock” (Bk XIII.38).
As I reflect on the nature of prayer and what Augustine is doing in this book, I am challenged in a couple of ways. First, do I have such a robust prayer life that I could pray to God like Augustine? Augustine prays about everything imaginable. Big things and small things: he prays about smiling as an infant, being beaten at school, dreams, friendships, reading, death, philosophy, memory, etc. Augustine’s prayer life is his whole life. I don’t know when I have ever heard someone pray about the nature of time. But Augustine does it.
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