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

Augustine might make Christianity plausible again for those who’ve been burned—who suspect that the “Christianity” they’ve seen is just a cover for power plays and self-interest, or a tired moralism that seems angry all the time, or a version of middle-class comfort too often confused with the so-called American Dream.

What Camus is honest about is what Heidegger calls Angst, the anxiety that emerges in such moments, calling into question everything that we consider to be the homey faux-comfort of our absorption in the world.

informing a theology of the Christian life as one of migration, a quest for a home one has never seen. Joy is arriving at the home you’ve never been to.

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 in you.”

“You cannot be your own light; you can’t, you simply can’t. . . . We are in need of enlightenment, we are not the light.”

Augustine framed this as the paradox of our unhappiness: “How does anyone suffer an unhappy life by his will, since absolutely no one wills to live unhappily?”

As he points out in one of his early dialogues, “Just as the soul is the whole life of the body, God is the happy life of the soul. While we are doing this, until we have done it completely, we are on the road.”

We are treating as ultimate what is only penultimate; we are heaping infinite, immortal expectations on created things that will pass away; we are settling on some aspect of the creation rather than being referred through it to its Creator.