Mesa Musings:

I picked up the “Confessions” of Augustine of Hippo the other day for some light reading.

I jest.

Actually, I read the entire work a number of years back but I periodically return to its pages to ponder the poignancy of its passages.

In it, the church father addresses issues and concerns that often rear their ugly heads in my life.

Augustine wrote “Confessions,” an autobiographical work, more than 1,600 years ago. It’s been said that it was the first Western autobiography ever produced. Written while he was in his early 40s, it lays bare Augustine’s misspent youth and subsequent conversion to Christianity at age 32.

A prolific writer, Augustine wrote more than a hundred titled works, all in Latin.

Whenever I revisit “Confessions” I’m moved by its astonishing candor, wisdom and humility.

In retrospect, the book, to me, embodies a concept expressed by the writer of Ecclesiastes nearly 700 years earlier: There’s nothing new under the sun. The experiences Augustine describes are in many ways my own.

Generations come and go. The sun rises and sets. Streams flow to the sea and the sea is not filled. And we seem to make the same wretched choices that were made by our forbearers generations ago.

Blessed with a prodigious intellect and gift for rhetoric, Augustine became a philosopher and theologian, and eventually the bishop of Hippo in what is modern day Algeria. In “Confessions,” he expresses sorrow for having lived an impulsive, immoral existence.

As Augustine lay dying in 430 A.D. — at age 75 — his biographer, Possidius, tells us that he spent his final days in prayer and repentance.

Augustine did not subscribe to the 21st century notion that, above all, personal success, achievement and self-esteem are to be venerated to the end. Deeply introspective, he questioned his motives and actions throughout his life, and he regularly repented and acknowledged his dependence on God.

The Psalms of David were hung on Augustine’s walls as he died, allowing him to meditate for a final time on the peaks and valleys of human experience — peaks and valleys that he knew well.

The message of his passing? Living and dying are ventures not to be taken lightly by mortals.

Augustine confesses that prior to his conversion he was a devotee of sensuality. But sensual pleasure – which we might label today as an addiction — gave him little actual pleasure. He was consumed by “wallowing in filth and scratching the itching sore of lust.”

Augustine sought to overcome his cravings and urges, but was frustrated at every turn. Though a life of depravity made him miserable, he resisted entering into God’s “narrow way,” as he described it.

“I (was) assured that it was much better for me to give myself up to thy love than to go on yielding myself to my own lust,” he confesses prayerfully. “Convicted by the truth, (I) had nothing at all to reply but … ‘leave me alone a little while.’”

Many negotiations with God take a similar course: “I’ll sin for just a bit longer, then I’ll clean up.”

“But … my … ‘little while’ went on for a long while,” Augustine continued. “‘O, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’”

Vice was his jailer.

“Thus I was sick and tormented, reproaching myself more bitterly than ever, rolling and writhing in my chain ’til it should be utterly broken.”

A child’s voice, singing a simple verse in a neighboring garden, led to his redemption. The child sang repeatedly, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.”

Whether it was a nursery rhyme or mystical utterance from some supernatural source, Augustine took it as a “divine command” to open The Book. He went immediately to the scriptures … and found his answer.

“In silence, (I) read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: ‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering (sexual immorality) and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.’”

The words of the Apostle Paul changed Augustine forever. He abandoned narcissism and accepted salvation.

JIM CARNETT lives in Costa Mesa. His column runs Wednesdays.