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One of the reasons that the Confessions continues to be one of the widest read books in the history
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of the world is precisely because of Augustine's insight into human experience. And he does a
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magnificent job of communicating both his own experience and what he lived and how that
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experience can indeed be a window, if you will, an opening to discovering a personal experience
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of God in human life. Augustine in the Confessions talks about friendship, talks about family
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talks about the importance of his mother, talks about his father, talks about human ambition
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talks about so many different aspects of human life, and then goes on to explain how these things
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helped or did not help his own personal pathway to discovering God
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and to discovering what is really holy about life. In the highly individualistic society that people are growing up in
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people think that my experience is the criteria am I happy or I not happy What that might really be is do I feel pleasure or don I feel pleasure Or do I feel selfish And if I feel okay then that all that matters
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Certainly, Augustine's experience says that, well, that isn't enough, and maybe what you're calling happiness isn't authentic happiness
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because you're going to lose that too. And most things that people seem to describe as, well, why are you happy today
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are things that are either very superficial or, at best, important for a short period of time
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but that aren't going to last forever. And Augustine gives some insight into helping people understand
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that having an experience of God brings you far beyond yourself, and that how an authentic experience of happiness has to include other people
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and has to include being concerned about other people. And those are elements that express, I think
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a very important part of the Gospel message. It's not just about me and my experience of God, either
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You might have people say, oh, I have an experience of God, and I don't have to do anything else
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Well, then that's probably not an authentic experience of God, because as we know from the Gospels
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as we know from the apostolic letters, if you love God, then you also need to be showing that
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by loving your neighbor, and that the two go hand in hand
