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

by James K.A. Smith

If we’re all we’ve got, then any hope for justice is on us, and politics is as close as we’ll get to an engine for bringing about the naturalized kingdom of god. Pelagian activism—resigned to, yet confident in, human power and ingenuity—is prone to being blinded by innocence. Indeed, as a later Augustinian, Reinhold Niebuhr, would put it, our atheistic confidence makes us “incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency.”

Thank God we're not all we've got. Comey loves Niebuhr. Comey is an Augustinian?

Evil is not a puzzle to be solved but an incursion to be beaten back.

The evil itself is enough to make anyone question the existence and goodness of God. Which is why the forgiveness is even more mysterious, especially since this upsurge of grace and mercy was nourished by their faith in the crucified God who rose from the dead—the same faith that made them the sort of people who would welcome the unsettled young man to their Wednesday night Bible study, the outcast who would become their executioner. Such hospitality and forgiveness—such light in the midst of darkness—is generated by a trust that, to some, will look mad, or even irresponsible. Such irruptions of grace are a sign that jars us into considering whether the ball of fire at the heart of the cosmos isn’t, after all, in spite of everything, the fire of love.

Best practice: Remember grace when the eldritch horrors come. They'll come not single spies, but in battalions.

LATE CAPITALISM IS the age in which everyone has a computer in their pocket and a gaping hole where a father should be.

Indeed, the best way to be a father is to point your children beyond you, to a Father who never fails.

Nobody really wants to live forever, but nobody wants to die either. Nobody wants to watch people dying, so we have created entire industries to sequester them or rid ourselves of them, or we cleverly convince them to excuse themselves from our attention by exercising their autonomy. Perhaps even more pointedly, we don’t want to be seen dying, so the padded and privileged expend their energy and reserves on the creeping harbinger of death we call “aging.” Thus emerges another market, the wellness industrial complex, which at once capitalizes on our fear of dying and leverages what physician Raymond Barfield calls our “desire to be desirable.” “The fear of death, with no grasp of what makes a life truly good, is the stupendously irrational desire for mere duration.”2

What’s the use of living forever if you’re all alone on a Sunday?

“The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply,” he concludes, “was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die.”

The solution to loving mortals isn’t to withhold our love in a protective hedge against loss; rather, we can love long and hard, trusting in the God who is all in all, who gathers up our losses in a time beyond time. Even our grieving is suffused with hope because all our loves are caught up in the immortal Beloved who loves us first. All is not lost.

You reach a point on the road with Augustine where mere tourism comes to an end. You’re faced with a choice: Do you want to step in there? The next step isn’t arrival. It’s not the end of the road. To make that step won’t solve all your problems or quell every anxiety. But it is the first step of giving yourself away, arriving at the end of yourself and giving yourself over to One who gave his life for you. It is the first step of belonging to a pilgrim people who will walk alongside you, listen, and share their stories of the God who doesn’t just send a raft but climbs onto the cross that brings us back.