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

by James K.A. Smith

The reason Augustine tells his story is that he thinks it is simply an example of the human story—that we are all prodigals—and he wants us to ask ourselves a question: “What if I went home?”

For Augustine, psychology is cartography: to understand oneself is a matter of mapping our penchant to look for love in all the wrong places.

One’s own heart can be foreign territory, a terra incognita, and this lack of at-home-ness with oneself generates our propensity to run. We still can’t find what we’re looking for because we don’t know what we want. If we never seem to arrive, growing tired of every place that promised to be the end of the road, it’s because the terrain of our interior life is a wilderness of wants. When we leave home looking for happiness, we’re in search of the self we never knew.

One of the gifts Augustine offers is a spirituality for realists. Conversion is not a “solution.” Conversion is not a magical transport home, some kind of Floo powder to heaven. Conversion doesn’t pluck you off the road; it just changes how you travel.

To know where you’re headed is not a promise of smooth sailing.

Your hometown is the place you’re made for, not simply the place you’ve come from. 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.

For Augustine, so much of our restlessness and disappointment is the result of trying to convince ourselves that we’re already home. The alternative is not escapism; it is a refugee spirituality—unsettled yet hopeful, tenuous but searching, eager to find the hometown we’ve never been to.

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.

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. You might not have imagined it, but sometimes the good life looks like casseroles in the quiet sadness of a mournful home—a table prepared in the wilderness by a people who are hoping for a feast to come.

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.

The church isn’t a group of holier-than-thou saints who’ve formed a club; it’s a remarkable, otherwise impossible communion of people who, by the grace of God, stick alongside one another.

People look different through the lens of grace: instead of being competitors or threats, they’re gifts. Some are even friends.

Sometimes doubting your doubts is the beginning of wisdom.

This is the lexicon of an émigré spirituality, when a foreign tongue finds you and becomes your first language. You become who you are because this Word gives you the words to finally say who you are.

God doesn’t abstractly solve a “problem”; God condescends to inhabit and absorb the mess we’ve made of the world. God “has not abandoned humanity in its mortal condition.”

God doesn’t give us an answer; he gives us himself.

EVERY CHILD LOOKING for an absent, distant father is on the road to cover up a deeper desire: that such a father would come looking for them—that the arrow of hunger would be reversed and the father would return. Because then we would know he was thinking about us, looking for us, loving us.

At the heart of the madness of the gospel is an almost unbelievable mystery that speaks to a deep human hunger only intensified by a generation of broken homes: to be seen and known and loved by a father. Maybe navigating the tragedy and heartbreak of this fallen world is realizing this hunger might not be met by the ones we expect or hope will come looking for us, but then meeting a Father who adopts you, who chooses you, who sees you a long way off and comes running and says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

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