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

What if being human means being a cosmic émigré—vulnerable, exposed, unsettled, desperate, looking for a home I’ve never been to before? 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

That’s why Heidegger suggests that “proximally and for the most part”—his favorite phrase for naming our cultural defaults—our “everyday” existence is an unreflective absorption and immersion in the defaults “they” have set for me.

“In your gift we find our rest,” Augustine concludes. “There are you our joy. Our rest is our peace.”

What if being human means being a cosmic émigré—vulnerable, exposed, unsettled, desperate, looking for a home I’ve never been to before? 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

It’s not just a matter of finally settling down or coming to the end of the road. We find rest because we are found; we make it home because someone comes to get us.

Mothers, often caricatured, come off differently in such tropes. From Portnoy’s Complaint to Lady Bird, from Everybody Loves Raymond to Gilmore Girls, the mother must be overcome because her suffocating embrace is the means of her manipulation. Her presence swells and overwhelms and inhales all the oxygen an independent self needs to breathe. She d

You might think of Augustine as offering a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts.

Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety,

What’s emerging here isn’t just an admission of failure; rather, it’s the problem of getting exactly what you want.