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.

this hushed space, witnessing this encounter, I realize something I hadn’t appreciated before, and probably can’t ever fully understand: a solidarity that spans centuries, a sympathy that transcends geography, this bond between Monica and mothers who weep and pray and chase their children—misunderstood, unappreciated, resisted, resented.

the Manicheans prided themselves on their refusal to submit to any authority outside of their own reason, which was not so different from the rallying cry of Immanuel Kant’s essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” fourteen centuries later: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own reason! It’s the same watchword used today by tho

It was, he would later testify, like someone had finally shown him his home country, even though he’d never been there before. It was the Father he’d spent a lifetime looking for, saying to him, “Welcome home.”

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

Gabriel Marcel, a Christian among the existentialists, appreciated our road-hunger. Marcel described humanity as homo viator, “itinerate man.” But he was staunchly critical of Sartre’s view of freedom. Freedom isn’t digging a tunnel to escape, he counseled; it’s digging down into yourself.

To map our roaming like that of the prodigal is not a cartography of despair or self-loathing and shame; to the contrary, it is a geography of grace that is meant to help us imagine being welcomed home.

The range of our exterior wandering is mirrored by the interior expanse of the soul. “A human being as such is a huge abyss,” he would later muse to his God. “You know the number of hairs on his head, Master, and in you there’s no subtraction from that number; but it’s easier to count his hairs than his moods or the workings of his heart.”

He is struck by the power of maternal “weakness,” the saving power of the one who humbled himself, a power that mothers exhibit every day. “This is maternal love, expressing itself as weakness,” he tells his congregation. “All this is the mark of a mother’s weakness, not of lost majesty.” The mother, in other words, is an icon of the incarnation, t