Confessions (For Teens)

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was a North African, born in Thagaste in what is now Algeria. He was a brilliant teacher of public speaking who spent years chasing success, pleasure and answers. He became a Christian in Milan in 386, was baptised the next year, and later served for more than thirty years as bishop of Hippo, writing books that shaped Christian thinking for centuries.

Yes. It keeps the stolen pears, the lies, the years in a religious movement he later rejected, and his sexual history: he lived for about fifteen years with a woman he never married, had a son with her, sent her away to make a better marriage, and took someone else. It names that plainly, and says plainly that sending her away was a wrong done to her.

It is from the first page of the Confessions. Augustine means that God made people for himself, so nothing smaller than God can satisfy them. Every chase in the book, after praise, pleasure, cleverness and love, is that restlessness at work until it finds rest in God.

Yes, by his own account, as a teenager. He tells it in Book VIII against himself: he was afraid God would answer quickly and take away desires he still wanted to satisfy. It has become the classic picture of putting off doing what you know is right.

In 386, torn between his old habits and God, Augustine wept under a fig tree and heard a child's voice chanting “Take up and read.” He opened Paul's letters at Romans 13:13–14, and his doubt vanished. His friend Alypius read the next verse and joined him.

Both well and badly, and he says so. He was a loyal, warm friend, and he grieved deeply. But he lied to his mother to escape her at a harbour, and he sent away the faithful mother of his son. He confesses all of it without excuses and gives God the credit for whatever good there was.

A long prayer to God telling his life story, written around 397 to 400, when he was a bishop in his mid-forties. He wrote it to praise God's mercy, to tell honestly what he had been and what he still was, and to stir up his readers to turn to God. The quotations here are from E. B. Pusey's 1838 translation.

That restlessness is a signal, not a flaw; that crowds and habits can pull you further than you mean to go; that “not yet” has no end date; that people praying for you are not wasting their time; and that God is closer than you think: “Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee.”