On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

by James K.A. Smith

But if the road has beat you down; if the sights have become predictable and tired, and there are nights that you look at your friends in the car and wonder, “What the hell are we doing? Please just let me out”; if you’re weary from the chase, broken by the journey, tired of the disappointment, unsettled by a sense that you’d like to find some rest not in accomplishment but in welcome, then Augustine might be the stranger you could travel with for a while. Not because he’s going to blow sunshine and tell you feel-good stories, and not because he’s going to fast-track you to rest (beware of any religious types who roll up in a DeLorean promising time travel to either a nostalgic past or a pristine future). Augustine is the perfect guy for the road because he’s been on it and is sympathetic to all our angst on the way. There’s almost nothing you’re going to tell him that he hasn’t already heard. You’d be surprised by what a patient listener he is. He was born on the road, and he’s seen right through “the road is life” philosophy. He knows who he is, whose he is, and where he’s headed, and almost everything he writes is an effort to help fellow migrants on the way find an orientation that feels like peace. You might think of Augustine as offering a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts.