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

Sex is that paradoxical combination of vulnerability and assertion, giving ourselves up and wanting all the more.

So one can wonder whether Camus’s project isn’t governed—or at least stalked—by something like Augustine’s vision, a world that ought to have meaning, where evil is vanquished, where tragedy doesn’t have the last word, even if Camus concludes that’s not true.

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

We cultivate indifference as a cocoon. We make irony a habit because the safety of maintaining a knowing distance works as a defense. If you can’t find what matters, conclude that nothing matters. If the hunger for home is always and only frustrated, decide “the road is life.”

Radical Hermeneutics was also something of a manifesto for a philosophy that mattered. The introduction was titled “Restoring Life to Its Original Difficulty”; the final chapter, “Openness to Mystery.” This was a postmodernism with philosophical chops and a religious heartbeat.

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.

From On the Road to Easy Rider to Thelma and Louise, the road is a ribbon that wends away from convention, obligation, and the oppression of domesticity. Freedom looks like the top down, hair whipping brazenly in the wind, refusing to be constrained, en route to “Wide Open Spaces” (Dixie Chicks).

The cadences of worship are the rhythms where we learn to be free.

You don’t have to win, but you also don’t have to quit. You only have to quit performing, quit imagining his love is earned. You can rest, but you don’t have to quit. You just need to change why you play.

That kind of “power” is often despised in a world that can only imagine power as domination, in a patriarchal world—let’s be honest—where power is confused with testosterone-laden bravado. But Augustine is reminding us of that uniquely maternal power of God, echoed in the sacrifices that mothers make every day—the “weakness of God” that is stronger