Reflections on Augustine

I've been pondering the quote I put up from Augustine for a few days now.

"You ask what you should offer: offer yourself. For what else does the Lord seek of you but you? Because of all earthly creatures he has made nothing better than you, he seeks yourself from yourself, because you have lost yourself."

I particularly like that last bit about God seeking us out because we have lost ourselves. I am reminded of Christ's words in Matthew 16:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.

There are a few levels to this. On one level, I believe it is true that we find life when we are focused more on the needs of others than on our own. When we indulge our in born narcissism we ironically starve ourselves of the things that bring richness to life--love, friendship, family, and the like.
On another level it is impossible to escape the implication in Jesus' words: following him will not be comfortable. It's not just a message about "true happiness is found in helping others" but also a statement about the difficult, counter-cultural path Jesus calls his followers on, one that will lead to conflict with the powers that be and which is at times incompatible with worldly popularity.

Returning to the quote from Augustine, I wonder how skewed my appreciation of these words is given my position in history and my cultural background. In this late-modern, consumer capitalist culture of ours we are drawn to the repetition of the word "yourself" like moths to light. I am predisposed to get a warm fuzzy feeling by this quote in large part because of my conditioning. How hard it is to take these words deeply to heart, not because they are hard words but because our hearts respond to different meanings within those words than the ones most likely originally intended.

All of which returns me to prayer. One of the biggest problems I am encountering is the tendency to render prayer primarily a journey of self-discovery and self-improvement (as if we needed any more of such dreck in this culture so richly supplied with it). There is an undeniable focus on the individual in prayer. Our cultural bias towards individualism makes this entire subject dangerous stuff, puts us at increased risk of misinterpreting and misconstruing the subject because it deals in an area we have real trouble with.