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

There is joy in the journey precisely when we don’t try to make a home out of our car, so to speak. There is love on the road when we stop loving the road. There are myriad gifts along the way when we remember it’s a way. There is delight in the sojourn when we know where home is.

The goal isn’t returning home but being welcomed home in a place you weren’t born, arriving in a strange land and being told, “You belong here.”

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.

The Christian gospel, for Augustine, wasn’t just the answer to an intellectual question (though it was that); it was more like a shelter in a storm, a port for a wayward soul, nourishment for a prodigal who was famished, whose own heart had become, he said, “a famished land.”

“No he did not,” Dunham retorts. “He did,” Karr assures her. She reflects on the experience: “I was so glad that I had turned it off. I got to help him to feel a little better or whatever, feel like he had some agency in the world. What did that cost me? Do you know what I mean? For me, a lot of times I walk into Mass and I look at people and I thi

Curiositas is the anxious burden of having to always be clever.

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.”

The freedom to decide what is my own good is enshrined in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

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