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

by James K.A. Smith

By some grace inexplicable, you start on your way back home. And as you’re yet again rehearsing a long speech that is three parts apology and two parts legal plea for reinstatement, you’re bowled over when that Father of yours comes running and gathers you up in his arms while your head is down, and your mother later tells you, “He walked to the end of the road every single day waiting for you.”

There are two very different kinds of dissatisfaction or restlessness. One is engendered by disappointment, by not knowing where home is, by thinking you’ve arrived only to later become tired of the place or realize it’s not home in the way you thought it was. In this case the road is the endless exhaustion of continuing to try to locate home, the frantic search for rest. That is the angst of the prodigal still in exile.

But there is another kind of restlessness that can be experienced on the road, a fatigue that stems from knowing where home is but also realizing you’re not there yet—a kind of “directed” impatience.25 The first is a baseline aimlessness that keeps looking for home; the second is the weariness of being en route, burdened by trials and distracted by a thousand byways and exhausted by temptations along the way that sucker you into forgetting where home is.

The longings of the refugee—to escape hunger, violence, and the quotidian experience of being bereft in order to find security, flourishing, and freedom—are good and just precisely because they are so deeply human. They even signal something about our spiritual condition: that our unshakable hopes of escaping a bereftness of the soul and finding the security of a home are not absurd. The exhaustion we experience from perpetually seeking, the fatigue of trying to live as if “the road is life,” the times we crumple onto the road just wishing someone could find us and take us home—the persistence of this hope almost makes us wonder if it could be realized.

A refugee spirituality does not make false promises for the present. It is not a prosperity gospel of peace and joy in the present. It warns of the allure of imagining one could settle in and for the present. An émigré spirituality is honest about what is not granted to our generation, so to speak—what is not granted to the human condition in this vale of tears. Hope is found in a certain art of saying goodbye, but also in looking ahead to the day when Someone will greet us with, “Welcome home”—and knowing how to navigate in the meantime.

Joy is arriving at the home you’ve never been to.

Your hometown—where joy is found—is a place you arrive at and immediately feel “at home” in, even though you’ve never been there before. This is not the mere joy of return; it is the joy of the refugee who has found a home.

Like the exhausted refugee, fatigued by vulnerability, what we crave is rest. “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests

The soul’s hunger for peace is a longing for a kind of rest from anxiety and frantic pursuits—it is to rest in God. And for Augustine, to find this rest—to entrust ourselves to the one who holds us—is to find joy.

But it is also the exhale of someone who has arrived—who can finally breathe after making it through the anxiety-inducing experience of the border crossing, seeking refuge, subject to the capricious whims of a world and system that could turn on her at any moment. What we long for is an escape not from creaturehood but from the fraught, harrowing experience of being human in a broken world. What we’re hoping for is a place where a sovereign Lord can assure us, “You’re safe here.”

LIKE HIS REALIST spirituality, Augustine’s refugee spirituality is an account of what the Christian life feels like. The disciple as much as anyone finds herself between, on the way, fatigued yet hopeful. Baptism isn’t a capsule that transports us to the end of the road. Conversion is not an arrival at our final destination; it’s the acquisition of a compass.

“The human will does not attain grace through its freedom, but rather attains its freedom through grace.”33

The trick, Augustine points out, is to aspire to one’s office, and aspire to excellence in that office, without letting praise for your excellence be the overriding goal of your ambition. “Be our glory,” he prays. “Let it be for your sake that we are loved.”

Resting in the love of God doesn’t squelch ambition; it fuels it with a different fire. I don’t have to strive to get God to love me; rather, because God loves me unconditionally, I’m free to take risks and launch out into the deep. I’m released to aspire to use my gifts in gratitude, caught up in God’s mission for the sake of the world. When you’ve been found, you’re free to fail.

The true friend is the other who hopes you’ll answer the call, who’s willing to challenge you and upset you in order to get you to look at yourself and ask yourself: What am I doing? What do I love? Who am I? The true friend is the other who has the courage to impose a conviction, who paints a substantive picture of the good, who prods and prompts you to change course and chase it—and promises to join you on the way.

Alypius is the model for the community of friendship the church is trying to be: a people who are called to come and sit with the world. To be present with it in its tragedy.

I realize that there are many places that call themselves “churches” that don’t feel like this, that seem anything but hospitable. You won’t find any defense of them from me. But I might encourage a second look. Let your eyes skate past the megachurch industrial complex and take note of the almost invisible church in your neighborhood that you’ve driven past a thousand times without noticing. Check on it some Tuesday night, and see if there aren’t lights on in the basement. Maybe the food pantry is open. Or the congregation is offering financial management classes or marital counseling for couples who are struggling. It might just be the choir practicing, giving some souls an appointment to look forward to each week that pulls them out of their loneliness.

People look different through the lens of grace:

The question isn’t whether you’re going to believe, but who; it’s not merely about what to believe, but who to entrust yourself to. Do you really want to trust yourself?

Having eyes is not the same thing as looking, and looking is not the same as seeing. The soul therefore needs three things; eyes which it can use aright, looking, and seeing.”26 But only healthy eyes can see, and faith restores the health of the eyes.

But what Platonism could never have imagined was that the Good would descend to us; that the eternal God would condescend to inhabit time and a body; that the divine would humble itself and swing low to carry humanity home.

He encourages caution about hastily considering the matter settled: “If you are not sure what I am saying and have doubts about whether it is true, at least be sure that you have no doubt about your having doubts about this.”44 Sometimes doubting your doubts is the beginning of wisdom.

And so the culmination of Augustine’s conversion is picking up a book in which he finds himself.

when you keep looking inward only to find an unplumbable depth of mystery and secrets and parts of yourself that are loathsome, then Scripture isn’t received as a list of commands: instead, it breaks into your life as a light from outside that shows you the infinite God who loves you at the bottom of the abyss.

When we fall prey to the hubristic need for intellectual mastery, the need to comprehend everything and hence explain everything, we end up naturalizing evil and thus eviscerating it, undercutting the ability to protest against it.

The quest for the root, the seed of evil—to identify the cause of how it stole into the world—undercuts the tortured perplexity that generated the question in the first place. The question arises from our experience of dissonance (“This can’t be right! This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be!”). Our answers too often squelch that dissonance and thus make the question moot.

We also devalue or deny our intuitions of what ought to be—what is good and beautiful, what gratitude is for. When we try to extinguish the dark mystery of evil with the light of explanation, we simultaneously dim the radiance of beauty that befalls us unbidden. We forfeit the impulse to say “thank you”; we rule out the joy that attends those momen...