What I Learned from an Ancient Theologian and an Aging Rocker
I read recently of a man who saw his daughter laughing as she looked at her screen.
“What’s so funny?”
“This old man is singing and dancing around like a chicken.”
The dad came over to see for himself, expecting to find another anonymous performer claiming his fifteen minutes of fame. Instead, he saw Mick Jagger, now in his seventies, performing his signature anthem, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” singing and dancing around like a chicken.
One of the reasons that story caught my eye is that I am also reading about another restless soul, Augustine, the North African theologian who continues to have an enduring effect on theology nearly two thousand years after his death. James KA Smith’s On the Road with Augustine: Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts, explores the spiritual sojourn of the man whose thinking and writing continue to have a profound effect on Christian theology.
Smith uses the analogy of a road trip to recount Augustine’s spiritual journey. Augustine was, indeed, a restless soul. His restless ambition took him from his home (and his praying mother) to the bright lights of the big city, Rome, where he discovered what we all find when we arrive at our final destination: it’s not all we’d hoped for.
In Augustine’s case, his mother’s prayers were answered, and her wayward son did come home. Not just back to North Africa but also back to the faith he knew as a child. But even though Augustine would go on to a long and illustrious career as a theologian and church leader, he always understood that we really are always on a journey.
We are never really at Home, not in this life anyway.
Why is it so true that our hearts are always restless?
Why is restlessness such a baked in component of the human condition? Why is that regardless of how comfortable and secure our surroundings, regardless of how supportive our circle of friends and family, we never really do feel that we are at Home?
Maybe Jagger’s song has resonated so well because he was onto something. Our hearts really are restless, and nothing here and now can provide the kind of satisfaction we crave.
Why is this so? Perhaps it is because God has “set eternity” in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and this broken world was never meant to be Home to us. When our father Adam and our mother Eve shook their fists in God’s face, they were banished from the Garden, cursed to roam the unfriendly world, along with all their offspring for countless generations to come. In the Fall, we were all cursed to be filled with a longing for Home that can never be satisfied in this life.
CS Lewis’ spiritual journey began when he first experienced “Joy,” not a happy feeling but a sort of deep, piercing longing for something that is always out of reach. That deep, insatiable longing eventually led him from atheism to a belief in the God of the Bible, then finally to faith in Jesus.
Later, he would recall how his encounters with “Joy” first began to point him toward God: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
Augustine and Jagger are both right. There is an anxious restlessness that seems to lie at the heart of all our longings. We somehow know that we are not yet Home. We are on a journey.
What should we do with our restlessness?
Some say we should extinguish the flame of desire, recalibrate our expectations so we don’t experience that constant yearning. But Lewis was right: there is in all of us a desire for something that nothing in this world can satisfy, and we cannot extinguish that deep, life-defining longing.
Others say we should abandon our hope for a destination and simply take pleasure in the journey itself. But something in us knows that a journey with no destination is a kind of despair. We need to know we’re going somewhere, and we need to know that we’ll find what we’re looking for when we get there.
The gospel teaches us that in Jesus, we have a Savior who has made it possible for us rebels and fugitives to receive a Royal Welcome into God’s Kingdom. But Jesus is also a trailblazer, one who has persevered all the way to the end of the road. This is why the Epistle to the Hebrews urges us to “run with endurance the race that lies before us, keeping our eyes on Jesus” (Heb 12:1-2).
As we run our long race, we can confess with Augustine that “our hearts are restless until we find our rest in Thee.”
Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor