Holy Restlessness!
I first learned of the ancient Christian sage Augustine through one of his striking prayers. If an utterance to God can achieve celebrity status, his would qualify. And it did not take me long as a young person to encounter it: “Our hearts, O God, are restless till they find their rest in you.”
The prayer’s pastoral tone runs counter to a common portrait of the fourth/fifth-century bishop: Someone who was the gloomy chaplain of predestination. Or hopelessly heady. But I sensed in the pithy phrase not a caricature of a pinch-faced cleric out to rout joy from the face of the earth, but someone authentically human.
And you probably noticed the word play, as I did, which Augustine was fond of: rest and restless. An unforgettable line, an arresting phrase (pardon my own pun): Here he suggests, even as he prays, that an experience of something’s counterpoint may actually make us more ready, more open to its contrast. Wearied restlessness heightens our eager need for rest.
And while it’s clever, I don’t think it took me long to understand Augustine’s prayer as more than an ancient equivalent of a meme or bumper sticker. It appears in the opening to a book Augustine titled Confessions, the title itself a word play, given its layered meanings. That is, while Augustine confessed his sins throughout the book, he also meant another, older meaning of the word: confessing as declaring and testifying. Like when we say, I confess to having reservations. To confess in that way is to acknowledge something true, more than dredge up some transgression. In some ways to confess is like its word cousin profess.
Not that Augustine doesn’t recount his lusts and immoralities and wandering after false religion, but there’s more to it than a dreary cataloguing of shortcomings, which is why as a young person, newly charged up in my faith, I resonated with a phrase about which I could only sense the bare beginnings of meanings. With all the adolescent energies swirling inside me, all the questions, all the longed-for closeness with God, I was drawn to what I sensed Augustine meant by restless. And I longed for something to calm my own sense of disquiet.
But I also now know that there is a place, always, whatever my age or stage in life, for restlessness. I mean restless as the opposite of complacent. As in a willingness not to settle, not to be too easily satisfied. Gregory of Nyssa, a few years Augustine’s senior, would likewise put the place for our unmet yearnings in a striking way: To respond to God, he said, was to go “from beginning to beginning, by beginnings that never cease.”
Discouraging? At times yes. I sense that dynamic in U2’s song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking for,” which has always struck me as having a poignant sense of incompleteness.
But Augustine’s prayer begins not with his discomfort, but his delight: “Lord, you stir [us] to take pleasure in praising you,” it begins, “because you have made us for yourself.” That’s why restlessness has a holy place in a spiritual person’s life: The discovery of God’s wondrous presence is followed by another. And another. On it goes as we travel deeper into a life with the One who created us.
And in Confessions, it turns out, Augustine does more than bemoan his lacks; he also overflows with praise for mercies extravagantly offered. He prefaced the line about restlessness and rest with a snippet found in a couple of Psalms: “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised.”
If the search for greater intimacy with God is never finished, I tell myself today that that means less the discomfort of an itchy sweater or a gnawing thirst, and more that life can grow more thrilling the further I proceed. We are lured more and more by an ineffable delight.