Reforming our Ambition: James K.A Smith

welcome to Redeemer Presbyterian Church thank you all for coming out on a drizzly evening I'm excited to have you all here with us this evening to hear from dr. Smith my name is Scott Co Guerra I'm the director of Redeemer Center for faith in work which is the cultural renewal arm of Redeemer Presbyterian Church it's a privilege to have Jamie Smith with us this week as his book on the road with agustin has launched it's made its official launch this week here in New York City and tonight I've asked Jamie to to join us to talk about ambition he spent the better part of the last decade exploring desire and how were formed by culture and how were forming culture and the the sort of interplay between those things but mainly around this question of what it is that we love and I think this new book is an exciting journey through Augustine's eyes helping us to kind of look at and frame the way we're pursuing things in the world the way we're desiring things and to sort of interrogate those things in ourselves and a little bit about Jamie he one of his first books was called the fall of interpretation when I read this book I had been reading another book with a group of students and Jamie's book had been written before that book came out but he read the book just as his book was going to the publisher and he couldn't not respond to the book in his footnotes so he just couldn't help himself as a philosopher he had to engage this new piece of work that was out there maybe in the revised edition he engages a little bit more but Jamie has been a resource to the church and to Trish me a large I think we'll hear from him tonight on this issue both he'll speak to us and then that will be followed by Pastor David Lee from our downtown congregation will interact with him a little bit and we'll give you all the chance to ask questions via text also have a microphone up front so without further ado I'll bring Jamie up thanks so much Scott it's really felt like I've known Scott forever and appreciate the hospitality and the chance to partner again and I've been writing down all the song and and band recommendations he's been giving me tonight so it's great and thanks David I'm really looking forward to our conversation afterwards thanks for being part of this and thanks to all of you for coming out I actually kind of want to do two things with you tonight and they are going to intertwine on the one hand I want to commend to you a kind of principle or axiom for the Christian life and it's this apprentice yourself to ancient friends apprentice yourself to ancient friends and then what I want to do is I want to illustrate why you should do that with Saint Agustin my homeboy okay so I want to I want to make a case for why actually I think one of the best things that contemporary Christians can do for the future of the faith and for our own lives and calling and spiritual journey is to apprentice ourselves to ancient friends and I want to give you an example of that by thinking through the dynamics of a bit ambition which i think is a perennial issue in theme and challenge for us think through the dynamics of ambition with my ancient friend who could be your ancient friend too if you're interested he's not exclusive st. Augustine so let me let me first of all explain this sort of baseline principle that I think is worth talking about which is I think as a general principle both for spiritual growth and I would say professional creativity I'd like to encourage Christians to adopt the practice of walking alongside and apprentice in our selves to ancient friends now why why would that be helpful well first of all because it runs counter to the what I think CS Lewis called the chronological snobbery that tends to characterize our and it runs counter to a sort of default assumption of progressed progress that always seems to assume that newer is better that we are somehow smarter than those who've come before us to cultivate ancient friendships is to actually realize we're not near as smart as we think we are and that we have forgotten a lot of wisdom as we have signed up for our alleged progress our our enlightenment has actually been a kind of forgetting of all kinds of treasures of knowing and self-knowledge and I would say Christians are not immune to this I mean there's there are entire Christian industries if you will that are predicated on what's the next best thing what's the new formula who's got the new solution that nobody has ever ever thought of before and and what I'm saying is I'm not buying it I'm not interested I would much rather apprentice myself to ancient wisdom now why what happens when you sort of go back to these ancient voices these pre-modern sources well one in a sense the distance that these ancient friends have from us actually can give contemporary Christians a sort of long view on our present in other words if I go back to and listen to the ancient wisdom of early church fathers and mothers and hear their take on what it means to follow Jesus and they're also there sort of cultural analysis if you will all of a sudden that takes me out of my immersion the blinder digs istant that I experienced and it gives me a new way to see my own moment and in a sense the centuries work like this sieve that kind of sift out what's perennial and worth preserving and worth learning from in that sense I think also that ancient friendships can be very orienting right they give you they give you another way to kind of orient yourself peg yourself to a kind of star that's outside of your our tiny little cosmos they're like a guiding North Star that's above the flux and tumult that we experience as our 24-hour news cycle which is absolutely exhausting to go back to these ancient voices who've never heard of CNN who've never heard of Donald Trump and to say you know what there are things that are going to last longer than the presence and that endure and to remember that we are a people of permanent things I think is an important discipline I don't know if any of you know the photographer Sally Mann but she published a really remarkable memoir a while back and in it she she discovers a diary that her father had written and at one point his in his scribbling her father said this do you know how a boatman faces one direction while rowing in the other it's a very very suggestive image right in other words if you picture this boatman who actually wants to go there is moving ahead but the posture and position of the boatman is actually keeping himself straight by looking back that's what I mean by apprentice in yourself to an ancient friend the point isn't nostalgia the point is an antiquarian the point isn't to go back in time it's actually to move forward but with the wisdom and orientation and strength that comes to us by looking back to gifts that have preceded us so that's what I want to do tonight with st. Agustin I want to in a way for us to adopt a posture of looking back but precisely so that we can move forward and I want to do this by thinking about what something that I think is a mmm fairly common challenge in New York City which is how do we think about ambition in fact what percentage of people are in New York City because of ambition it's got an exceptional percentage right so what I want to do is model I hope how an ancient friend like Agustin can give us some perspective on our own experience of a perennial challenge like ambition now I don't want to presume too much of you in terms of your familiarity with Agustin so let me give you just the briefest of biological but not biological I have no idea I know nothing about Agustin's biology his biography however let me just give you the briefest of biographical snapshots to sort of get us located and then we'll dive into his life story a little more so Agustin lives in the late 300s and early 400s okay so he lives and is born and raised in North Africa what today would be contemporary Algeria at a time when that entire sort of northern coast in region of Africa is a province of the Roman Empire right he is a child of a kind of bicultural and and perhaps and probably biracial home because his mother is a native Berber African Monica and his father is Roman pagan named Patrick and so Agustin knows also I think an experience that a lot of people in a place like New York City have a cosmopolitan experience of this sort of bicultural existence and experience and an experience of what you might call the kind of hybridity from the beginning of his life what happens though the the what so much of what we know about st. Agustin is from his great classic called the confessions which he writes later and midlife it is still on the reading list of the liberal arts program at Columbia University it is one of the great pieces of Western literature and what it recounts is the story of Agustin's adventures as now here's how it works Augustine is basically a brilliant intelligent ambitious provincial out on the edge of the Empire who now aspires and so what does he do he first of all makes his way to Carthage because he gets into the university at Carthage and he stuns people at Carthage because he's brilliant and what does that turn into it turns into a job in Rome and when he gets to Rome again he gets the attention of what of the powers that be and the one thing is it's maybe a little bit weird that people might not realize is that this moment in the Roman Empire oddly the seat of imperial power is not in Rome it's in Milan so in fact what eventually happens is Agustin catches the eye of the Emperor of impure of the Imperial Palace and is recruited to become an a rat or an oratorio position post it's sort of like a speechwriter slash lawyer slash grammar teacher for the Emperor in the imperial court in Milan okay I think I'll leak I'll leave the story at that because I don't want to spoil it if it's new to you the one way I put it is though this basically Agustin was a Manhattanite 1,500 years before New York City existed do you see why because he knows the story of so many people who are here in this city which is a story of aspiration ambition climbing and success and not a few coming from the provinces to do it you come to the city to make your mark now with that brief biographical snapshot now I want to just dive let's think for a moment about ambition as a phenomenon I think ambition is a many-splendored and much-maligned thing now and I think your take on ambition depends on what demons you're trying to exercise in your life so for example if you're surrounded by prideful power-hungry egomaniacs who are bent on making a name for themselves through Bab Elian endeavors we might say well then ambition looks ugly and monstrous and domineering but here's the thing if you're surrounded by Placid passive go with the flow aw shucks folk who are leaving unused gifts on the table and failing to respond to God's call in their lives then actually ambition looks like liberation faithfulness and the narrow way can you feel the difference between those two things I say that to be very very candid as somebody who's here from Michigan I understand I understand why ambition can get a bad rap but if you sort of spend enough time around Midwestern nice where people are a little bit too happy to not like want to get noticed or draw attention to themselves and it always kind of breaks my heart when I see young people who have incredible gifts but sort of settle for something when I think that they could have answered a call to a kind of greatness so I just want to make sure that you hear I'm not here to demonize ambition at all I'm here to analyze ambition and so ambition isn't any one thing it can't be simply celebrated or demonized in fact there's a wonderful collection essays called ambition that includes reflections by folks like Eugene Peterson and Jeanne Marie Walker and some folks like this and in that volume the poet Scott Karen's who some of you might know his work Scott Karen says this either we are called to greatness or we are not called at all that's ambition Donald Hall once said when you're a poet who's 25 you want to be Dante by the time you're 45 you just want to be published in The Paris Review we are either called to greatness or we are not called at all that's ambition but in the same set of reflections you there's clearly a shadow side to ambition and so in the same collection lucy shaw another poet talks about warding off celebrity and fame which she describes as the bastard offsprings of unfettered ambition so it's a mixed report it's a many-splendored much maligned thing what I would suggest is if you keep walking around this phenomenon of ambition I think you'll start to notice at least two features the first is this the opposite of ambition is not humility the opposite of ambition is not humility the opposite of ambition is sloth passivity timidity complacency this is important we we like to sometimes comfort ourselves by imagining that the ambitious are if so facto prideful and arrogant because if we just imagine that those things are synonymous that the ambitious are prideful and arrogant that way those of us who never risk who never aspire who never launch out into the deep get to where the moralizing mantle of humility when in fact it might just be thin cover for a lack of courage and sloth so the opposite of ambition is not humility playing it safe isn't humble those are different phenomena the second feature that I think is worth noting and this will be important for Agustin's analysis it is the Telos of ambition that distinguishes good from bad now I just realized I use a Greek word so let me back up for say so tell us is a Greek word that simply means goal or end it comes to us from the language of virtue ethics Aristotle and so on in that sense it is the Telos the goal the end of ambition that distinguishes good from bad ambition it's the Telos that separates what we could might call faithful aspiration from self-serving aggrandizement agustin we're going to discover never stopped being ambitious what changed was the target the goal the how of his striving here's the question we all need to ask ourselves this is the Augustinian question about ambition what do I love when I long for achievement what do I love when I long for achievement what do I want when I want accomplishment what am I looking for in this aspiration that is the Augustinian question so let me take you back to the drama of Augustine's experience of this interestingly I think you could say that Agustin drank in ambition with his mother's milk if the scrappy provincial was hankering to make it in Carthage and then Rome climbing the ladder of recognition all the way to Milan it's in no small part because he was propelled there by his parents like many before and after him the map of Augustine's aspiration was drawn by his mother and his father his ambition in some ways was imposed by the expectations of parents who had their own ambitions how many of you are watching HBO's succession this is a meditation on imposed parental ambition okay one of the only times interestingly one of the only times where you will hear Agustin be critical of his mother Monica is when he thinks back to why his parents sent him to school why they sent him let's call it to university he looks back and here's what he recalls they gave no consideration for the use I might make of the things that they forced me to learn the objective they had in view was merely to satisfy the appetite for wealth and glory though that appetite is insatiable the wealth is in reality destitution of spirit and the glory something to be ashamed of in fact he looks back and he's kind of bitter about this ambition that his parents imposed on him because he says they really were endangering his soul he puts it this way my family did not try to extricate me from my headlong course the only concern was that I should learn to speak as effectively as possible because he was training to be this rat or this public speaker he was supposed to go win get first in class so he could land the best job it's a little bit reminds me of how many of you have read Andre Agassi's memoir open it is a stunning stunning book and one of the most remarkable things that you learn about Andre Agassi the great tennis pro from the from the nineties issue Andre Agassi hated tennis he hated tennis it was his father's dream and in the same way Agustin that kind of recounts all the way said he hated learning in no small part because his parents treat it so instrumentally for their own ladder climbing hopes living vicariously through the son who has to endure it now there's a fascinating little book by a historical theologian named justo Gonzales called the mestizo Agustin and he looks at this this concept of the the person who has a hybrid experience of culture the mestizo and he says Agustin is like a mist like a North African mestizo in the 3rd 4th 4th and 5th centuries and part of what that experience often looks like Gonzales says is immigrant children often know exactly what a Dustin is talking about here this vicarious imposed ambition in some ways to use a mitrios language Monica is the first Tiger mom well surely not the first but one of the first to emerge in Western literature as a character so that might be how it started but really if it was imposed by his parents by the time Agustin gets to his 20s he owns it this this is now who he is that he's chasing this himself he says he's looking back on his earlier life in his 20s late teens and early 20s he says I wanted to distinguish myself as an orator for a damnable and conceited purpose namely delight in human vanity now this is his ambition in his 20s the chase is all him as a teacher of the Arts they call liberal he says he was actually after something else and here's how he sees it now looking back we pursued the empty glory of popularity ambitious for the applause of the audience at the theater when entering verse competitions to win a garland of mere grass now okay good I get it that does not sound like the world of Finance but what you have to sort of transpose yourself to Agustin's worldliness was he saying is look if you want to be a rat or you want to win the rhetoric competition where you get the garland of grass because this is like scoring first in your class which is precisely how you put it on your CV and resume which is then when you have applied to the imperial palace that that's what they take notice of we didn't really care about learning for learnings sake we cared about learning because of what credential it could give us to climb the ladder does this not sound familiar what are we looking for in our ambition what do we hope to find at the end of our aspirations in Agustin's experience like our own the answer is it's complicated and I think this is very very important it's complicated there are a bundle of hopes and hungers that are bound up with our ambitions but so often they boil down to the twin desire to win and be noticed the twin desire of domination and attention to win and to be noticed to win the crown and be seen doing it we I think sometimes in our experience we often imagine greed is almost inextricably intertwined with ambition they might commonly go together I actually don't think that they are essentially alive and and the some of the forms of ambition that really intrigued me are when you actually have more money than you could ever know how to spend it and you still have to win everything it's clearly not about the money it's not greed there's something else that we're looking for that we're hungry for in this quest so a dustin's map of this particular terrain of our hungry hearts is as useful as ever because so little has changed when agustin reflects on ambition he really starts to dive and delve into the dynamics of what we might just call Fame and could anything be more contemporary we live in an age where everybody's famous we're trying to be we've traded the hope of immortality for a shot at going viral we live in an age where attention is one of the most powerful drugs so for a Gustin the only way to get to the root of this desire what am I looking for when I'm I'm after this is actually to understand it as a spiritual craving this is a manifestation of a spiritual craving and it's actually why you can only truly understand this ordered ambition bent and crooked ambition if you read it now as a kind of idolatry now I want to pause for a sec because I always get nervous when I treat out the I trot out the idolatry word because you're worried about fire and brimstone and it sounds when I when I offer idolatry as a way to think about what's going on all I mean to name is a spiritual craving and hunger this is a religious phenomenon it's not just a psychological or cultural phenomenon and if our ambition becomes a roadblock to finding peace an inhibitor of our joy it's because we've substituted this is a gustin's analysis we've substituted something for the end that we're really made for so the point of discussing ambition in terms of idolatry is not finger-wagging denunciation i mean it as a diagnostic you see you have to remember our idolatries our less conscious decisions to believe something false and they are more like learned dispositions to hope in things that are going to disappoint us I doubt I think idolatries are less on the register of belief than they are on the register of hope and hunger and desire our idolatries are not often intellectual they are effective they are instances of what a Gustin are called disordered love and devotion idolatry in that sense is caught more than it's taught we we practice our way into these idolatries they're absorbed from the water in which we swim so existentially the problem with idolatry isn't just that it's like false or something here's here's a gustin's existential experience of what's wrong with such idolatrous hungers and cravings they are exercises in futility it's a pen that ends in profound dissatisfaction and unhappiness idolatry you might say doesn't work it's dysfunctional it doesn't work because it can never achieve what it actually wants it's it's why it creates restless hearts so in idolatry we are enjoying a Gustin would say what we're supposed to be using where we're treating as ultimate something that's meant to just be penultimate were or think of it this way do you all know the great line from the beginning of agustín's confessions you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you you have made us for yourself for God and our hearts are restless until they rest in you well what's going on in idolatry Agustin would say is we are taking this inbuilt infinite hunger and aiming it at finite things as if those could satisfy so what's going on the reason why I'd Allah trees don't work is we heap infinite immortal expectations on created things that are going to pass away when that hunger is actually built designed inscribed in us to find its end in the one who is infinite and who will never pass away so we said all in what happens in idolatry is we settle on some aspect of the creation rather than being referred through it to the create hor Agustin this is one of the ways that Agustin uses the metaphor of the journey to describe the human condition and he says what goes wrong in our disordered love is disordered love is like climbing into a boat because you want to get to the other Shore and then you decide the great boat I love this boat the boat is a bar there's a bowling alley Jimmy liked it this is a fantastic whoo-hoo I never want to get out of the boat and so you settle for the boat instead of the destination that you were made for that is like the dynamics of disordered loves the problem of course is that boat cannot last forever no boat can last forever the boat is also going to start to feel very claustrophobic at some point and your heart is built for another Shore so when our ambition settles as it were for attention or when our ambition just settles for domination when we imagine that our goal was to be noticed or to win we're actually lowering our sights in a way we're aiming low the arc of our ambition is hugging the earth and we expect to find fulfilment from people looking at us and or beating everyone else in this competition but listen what happens when their attention turns away fleeting as it is what happens after you get the grass garland to the metal the scholarship the promotion how many likes is enough how many followers will make you feel valued what if we're wired not to be liked but to be loved and maybe it's less important being liked by many then loved by the one you're made for could that explain why all the attention is never enough could it also explain I know some of you in here know the six Ariane's I don't know what else describe it other than the postpartum depression of getting everything you want it do you know what I'm talking about you achieve everything you set out to accomplish and you're on the top of the mountain and you are profoundly sad and lonely oh maybe this wasn't what I was looking for maybe this wasn't the end why does winning still feel so Restless now I think the interesting the most interesting moment in Augustine's story is a hard lesson because what what we see is that in agustín's experience disappoint that disappointment is actually the gateway to joy it was ambition that brought Agustin from Rome to Milan but it was a tainment in Milan it was actually achieving everything that he wanted and hoped for that unsettled him agustín's Milan you have to remember this is agustín's Milan is basically your New York somebody's London it's somebody's LA it's somebody's DC the cities of our ambition are perennial and Agustin comes to Milan with that sort of ambition he says here's how he puts it I aspire to honors money marriage that still happens marriage actually in that case being another way to secure money too I aspired to honor money marriage and you God laughed at me in those ambitions I suffered the bitterest difficulties that was your mercy difficulties here that he's talking about did not stem from failure the difficulty stemmed from success he wasn't unhappy because he didn't make it he was unhappy where he made it and he was becoming less and less adept at pretending that he was happy and so this disappointment becomes a gateway for Agustin to now entertain an entirely different way of being ambitious he starts to realize that maybe I could aim for something I could never lose so what happens is he it's pretty cool how this happens actually in this is book 8 of the book seven and eight is where this drama is unfolding in Augustine's Confessions and he sort of crystallizes it into a day where he gets to deliver this panner g p-- energy which is kind of like a hymn of praise to the emperor you know this is the dream role and on the day that he gets to do this he's out sort of walking off his nervous energy and he basically walks by a drunk vagrant in the streets of Milan and he realizes that in some ways this guy is happier than he is so we're it's a weird dynamic reason but he's just realizing that in fact here I am at the pinnacle I've achieved everything and in some ways I feel like I've been robbed of joy and I see this guy here laughing with his friends and I'm thinking I might have been chasing the wrong things and then he says this oh and by the way the other thing there's so much I want to tell you but they're so at the same time this is really really providential two things are going on in in Milan first of all Agustin comes to Milan to achieve his heart's ambition to reach the pinnacle of professional in accomplishment you know what happens he basically meets Tim Keller ancient team colors name is Ambrose Bishop Ambrose and he starts listening to Bishop Ambrose who turns out to be both stunningly brilliant and a Christian and Agustin never thought you could put those two things together so paradigm shifts are going on in his experience and then another really really cool thing happens one of his African friends comes to visit him and he kind of sees what's going on in Augustine's life and he tells them this story about some other people who had experienced the same sort of letdown and disappointment when they had made it into imperial power courts and this is the story that he hears told about these others suddenly he says we were filled that this is again this other exemplars that his friend holds up for Agustin to consider suddenly he was filled with holy love and sobering shame angry with himself he turned his eyes on his friend and said to him tell me I beg of you what do we hope to achieve with all our Labor's what is our aim in life what is the motive of our service to the state can we hope for any higher office in the palace than to be friends of the Emperor that's what they are and in that position what is not fragile and full of dangers asked Mike Pence how many hazards must one risk to attain a position of even greater danger they realized we have been spending our whole lives to get to exactly this place that we're at and everything that we are holding on to and grabbing hold of as our accomplishment could be taken away tomorrow at the whim of an emperors change of mind and then they reflect on this whereas if I wish to become God's friend in an instant I may become that now here's the question what is our aim in life it's like that Seinfeld episode you write this is one brief flash of possible adulthood when Jerry and George asked you so I was like what are we doing with our lives and then they fall back into the non something what is our aim in life friends what are we aiming for when we aim our lives at some aspiration the question isn't whether we aim our lives our existence is like an arrow on a taut string it is going to be sent somewhere it's not a matter of quelling ambition it's not about settling as if that were somehow more virtuous the alternative to disordered ambition that ultimately disappoints is not some kind of holy lethargy or pious passivity it is recalibrated ambition that aspires for a different end for different reasons so what is the arc of a life whose aspiration is to be a friend of God what difference would that make well this is the only ambition that comes with security to aspire to be a friend of God is the only ambition that comes with security with a rest from the anxiety of every other ambition because all our other ambitions are fragile and from the attention of others is fickle domination of others is always temporary you cannot win forever just ask Rakhi attainment is a goddess who quickly turns a cold shoulder whereas to aspire to friendship with God is an ambition for something you could never lose to be a friend of God is to get attention now from someone who sees you and knows you and knows everything about you and will never stop loving you it's the opposite it's the exact polar opposite of fickle human intention which is temporal and ten mental and and here I think is you know that meme I don't know who needs to hear this I honestly don't know who needs to hear this but I know somebody here needs to hear this God's attention is not predicated on your performance God's seeing you and knowing you and loving you and never ever ending his friendship with you is not predicated on your performance you don't have to catch God's notice with your display he's not the father that you have to shock to jar his attention away from the game crying out look at me look at me you know t-bone Burnett Bruce Springsteen tells the story that rock and roll is a long history of young men saying to their fathers look at me look at me look at me God's attention is not like that God's attention is a place where you can find rest in fact in a later sermon agustin says to be seen by God in this way is in such an intimate picture to crawl into the father's lap you don't have to be worried about getting attention from anyone else when you have that attention you can rest and remember you have made us for yourselves and our hearts are restless until they rest in you what are we really looking for we're looking to rest at the end of that moving memoir open Andre Agassi recalls a scene before his last professional match at the 2006 US Open the story had been one of imposed ambition and a lifetime of alienation from his father who forced him to play tennis and now on the very eve of his retirement he has this dream he says I'm hobbing hobbling through the lobby of the Four Seasons the next morning when a man steps out of the shadows he grabs my arm he says what it's my father or a ghost of my father he looks ashen he looks as if he hasn't slept in weeks Pop's what are you talking about just quit go home you did it it's over see I think our culture of disordered ambition has only two speeds win or quit win then quit win or quit but perhaps our ambition to win is a hunger to be noticed maybe even a lifelong unarticulated hunger to be noticed by a father to hear him say well done you did it but that's not why he loves you you don't have to win but you also don't have to quit you only have to quit performing quit imagining that his love and attention can be earned you can rest but you don't have to quit you just need to change why you play see I think once you your loves are ordered in this way and you can rest in the Father then what happens is you release these aspirations to the Father and you release all of your aspirations in such a way that then God gives you your gifts back and you receive them with gratitude and then you get caught up in God's mission in the world and now you aspire to use all the gifts that he's given you to accomplish everything to the best of your ability but precisely so that you couldn't return gifts and gratitude it fundamentally reconfigures ambition now one last thing I have no idea what how I'm doing on time so I apologize it's over David's like come on wrap it up let me let me let me close with just one last thing it's this agustin and this is this is for for those of us who already think of ourselves on the Jesus way Agustin's is a spiritual realist now what I mean by that is this augustine also realizes that you cannot change your game overnight and if you've been sort of formed and shaped by a culture of disorder and ambition it will be very very difficult you don't just turn conversion doesn't turn off the switch it's like all of a sudden I know how to be ambitious in a well-ordered way no he says that's not going to happen in fact one of the my favorite aspects of Agustin's narratives so in the confessions book 1 to 9 is it chapters 1 to 9 if you will books 1 to 9 he's recounting his past life book 10 he's talking about himself in the present when he's a bishop in North Africa in in what's what's really remarkable and vulnerable on agustín's part is that when he's talking about the present he keeps admitting his own disordered Cluff and he says the one thing he says he uses first on to 1516 you know do not love the world nor the things of the world the lust of the flesh the lust of the eyes the boastful pride of life is a common translation for us in Latin in Augustine's vulgate Latin Vulgate that third temptation was was ambit Co Sekulow m-- secular ambition Gustin says lust of the flesh lust of the eyes I kind of got those taken care of well kudos but he says ambition hmm that one still plank see ambition still plagues me why because I want to be excellent that's not a bad aspiration but the trick is when you pursue excellence you know what starts happening people say great job you are amazing I can't believe you did that and so now what happens is your excellence Garner's the proverbial praise of men and then Agustin's like oh man I'm a sucker for that don't give me that I want to be excellent but I don't want to be doing it so that you'll say that to me but then he says but I mean I'm not gonna do a crappy job just to avoid that temptation that would be faithful Asst well so what he has to realize is in a sense pursuing excellence as a response of gratitude to God is always going to come with this risk of the praise of men and the possibility that he's doing it for the praise of men so if you ask Agustin are you doing this for God or are you doing this for yourself do you know what a gustin's answer is yes and that's liberating like confession is liberating in that regard to be honest about that I'll leave you with this prayer almost from Agustin he says in this conversation he ends this way to God he says be our glory let it be for your sake that we are loved be our glory let it be for your sake that we are loved that is an ambition worth pursuing thanks very much [Applause]

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Length: 50min 22sec (3022 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2019