Over my 25 years as a spiritual director, I don’t think I have quoted any line (apart from verses from the Gospels) more than St. Augustine’s dictum, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” These few words perfectly encapsulate the innate human desire for God, which I think resides deep within all of us, whether we know it or not.
The complete line, from Augustine’s Confessions, reads: “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
One of the reasons this line is so powerful for seekers (and believers) is that it, in a sense, ratifies and explains what they have been feeling. When people come to me with the first stirrings of a desire to know more about God, about spirituality and about prayer, there is often a sense of confusion. As in: Where is this coming from? Can I trust this? Am I crazy?
Almost always, I quote St. Augustine and ask: How else would God invite you closer than by awakening within you the desire for God? That is to say, the very desire that one feels for God is coming from God. We are, as St. Augustine said, made that way. It is one of the most important spiritual insights ever written.
It’s a key insight in Ignatian spiritual circles as well. In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius Loyola often counsels the retreatant to ask for the grace that they “want and desire,” begging God, for example, to have a more deeply felt experience of the risen Christ. I don’t think any of that would have been possible without Augustine of Hippo.
Our guest on this week’s episode of “The Spiritual Life” podcast, James K. A. Smith, explains how desire lies at the heart of the theology and spirituality of St. Augustine, unpacks both Confessions and The City of God, looks at the influence of Augustine of Pope Leo XIV (a priest of the Augustinian order himself) and charts the course of Augustine’s life for us. Along the way, we quote that most famous and most helpful line. Enjoy our rich conversation.
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