It still feels surprising to hear the faint echoes of a Chicago accent as I listen to the pope. (It is even more jarring to imagine the Holy Father enjoying the culinary delights of a “Chicago dog” in the stands at a White Sox game.) But what I hear, above all, in the witness and leadership of Pope Leo XIV is a distinctly Augustinian accent. One of the gifts of Pope Leo’s ministry has been to offer the gifts of Augustinian spirituality to the entire world. Lent, I would suggest, is an opportune season to consider how Augustine frames the Christian life in ways that are echoed in Pope Leo’s witness.

A Refugee Spirituality

We often think of Lent as a pilgrimage to the cross, a journey to Easter. In this sense, the Lenten journey is a compressed picture of the arduous journey that is the Christian life. But for Augustine, it is crucial that we do not confuse this pilgrimage with spiritual tourism—a getaway to simply recharge our religious batteries.

Indeed, for Augustine, if you really want to understand the harrowing, vulnerable journey of Lent—and the whole of the Christian life—picture the plight of the migrant. The Latin term that suffuses Augustine’s writings and sermons is peregrinatio. This is often translated into the language of “pilgrimage.” But that does not quite fit the picture Augustine has in mind.

The pilgrim usually makes a religious journey and then returns home. There is a certain kind of security in such an endeavor, an Odyssean sense of return. This might be why pilgrimage, in our day, can slide into a kind of pious tourism.

That is not what Augustine is describing. The peregrinus is not visiting abroad to just return home; rather, the Christian is called to a homeland she has never been to. We are resident aliens en route to the foreign patria we were made for. In one of his letters, Augustine says that God is the country “where true consolation of our migration is found.”

This means that the soul is more than just a pilgrim. We are migrants. We are spiritual refugees. We are looking and longing for a homeland we have seen before. But upon arrival in this foreign country, we realize it is home. We breathe a sigh of relief because finally, in God’s care, we are safe.

This reframing should help us hear afresh Augustine’s famous distinction, in his later work, between “the City of God” and the “City of man”—between the “earthly city” and the “heavenly city.” This is not a distinction between some ethereal realm and the cold, hard realities of this world. The City of God and the City of man are two different social realities, two different expressions of how to be human together—two different ways to imagine what it means to be a “society.” What distinguishes these two cities is their collective loves. The earthly city is governed by lust for power and domination (the libido dominandi, in Augustine’s memorable phrase); it is animated by love of self. In contrast, the City of God is a society animated by love of God; it is marked by sacrifice and humility.

Augustine envisions the City of God as a societas peregrina—a community of migrants. In the same way that Pope Francis described the church as a “field hospital,” we should picture the city of God as a refugee camp—a tent city of migrants journeying together, caring for one another, as we collectively make our way toward the patria that is Pater Noster. Conversion, for Augustine, is joining this caravan. There is no citizen of the city of God who did not arrive there as a refugee.

It is this picture of the Christian life that informs Pope Leo’s unfailing advocacy for migrants and refugees. In “Dilexi Te,” he exhorts the church to be a community on the way: “The Church, like a mother, accompanies those who are walking,” he says. “And she knows that in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community.”

I hear the same sensibility in Pope Leo’s homily on the Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord: “There is no room for God if there is no room for the human person,” he preached. “Yet, where there is room for the human person, there is room for God; even a stable can become more sacred than a temple.”

Sometimes our devotion to the security and stability of the temple bars the arrival of Christ. But God arrives in every stable where humility makes room. God is found in the precarious conviviality of the migrant caravan rather than the staid safety of our temples—whether on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue.

Let us hear in Pope Leo’s words a Lenten invitation to recognize our solidarity as migrants who are journeying with the caravan that is the city of God. The picture invites daily reflection in this season of self-examination.

Let us ask ourselves: Where am I going? What sort of journey am I on? Do I prize security more than venturing to the country that is God? Have I settled for spiritual tourism rather than the precarity of the tent city where Jesus tabernacles with the poor, the needy, the rejected and undocumented? Who am I journeying with? What doors have I closed? When have I conveniently failed to hear Christ knocking? How can I make room in my life for God’s arrival in the poor, the migrant, the refugee?

The Cross Is a Raft

In one of his homilies on the Gospel of John, Augustine evokes an image that feels even more charged to us today—having watched waves of migrants foundering on the seas, having witnessed their bodies on the shore. Preaching on the Mediterranean shore in north Africa, Augustine pictures the Christian life as emigration: “It is as if someone could see his home country from a long way away, but is cut off from it by the sea.”

This home country, paradoxically, is a place he has never been. But this migrant sees where he needs to go; he sees where home is “but does not have the means to get there.” We are stranded. The foaming “sea of this world” lies between us and home.

But the good news, proclaims the Doctor of Grace, is that God sends a boat from the other side: “So that we might also have the means to go, the one we were longing to go to came here from there. And what did he make? A wooden raft for us to cross the sea.” It is a raft in the shape of a cross. “For no one can cross the sea of this world unless carried over it on the cross of Christ.”

We journey to Easter on the cross. We are migrants seeking the homeland that is God, but Christ himself has joined our caravan, pitched his tent in our refugee camp. We will recognize him, Pope Leo says, in the face of every migrant. This Lent, God invites us to throw overboard all the distractions and temptations that take up so much space in our frantic, anxious lives. Let us throw overboard our penchants for security and comfort, throw overboard our idols and anger—all in order to make room for the arrival of Christ who arrives on this precarious raft, knocking at the door of our border, asking to be born in us again.

⸺

James K. A. Smith is a professor of philosophy at Calvin University and author of On the Road With Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. His new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, will be published in March by Yale University Press.

This article appears in March 2026.

James K. A. Smith is a professor of philosophy at Calvin University and author of On the Road With Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. His new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, will be published in March by Yale University Press.