![]() ![]() The draw of the world taps into the world we’re made for. That’s why sex, money, and fame seem to be where it’s at. That’s why we’re on the road in the first place. Our heart aches for a home that perhaps we’ve never been to. We might not even know if our Father will be there. We might not even know it’s he that we’ve left. “What if I went home?” (11) We are all, Augustine helps us see, the Prodigal Son wondering if our Father will have us back. A nagging question begins to repeat itself. Once on the road, we find the weariness of it all. So we make other things our god, coveting what others have. Wherever life happened is where Augustine wanted to be. He was climbing the ladder of the ancient world. Are we going to get somewhere or just going? Augustine was just going (4). Where “to be on the way is to have arrived” (3). We like the idea, Smith says, of “the road is life” (2) mentality. You can even show up to church every week with a voracious appetite for idols. You can play the role of the ‘good son’ with a heart that roams in a twilight beyond good and evil. You can still be living in your childhood bedroom and have departed for a distant country. You can be sleeping in the same bed and be a million miles away from your partner. You can depart in your heart and take an existential journey to anywhere but the ‘here’ that’s stifling you. “It’s like all we ever do is leave, ‘Honey, all I know to do is go,’ the Indigo Girls confess in ‘Leaving.’ You can leave without a bus ticket, of course. After the burden has grown large enough and the offer of freedom looms large enough, we pack it in and run. His point is clear: we all react the same way to life. No matter who you are, where you’ve been, or what you’ve seen and done, it’s all there. The first page of the first chapter is like a microscope turned toward your heart. Through them all, I saw the destination he takes the reader, and I was glad to have been along for the ride. Others left me nodding off before I finally got around the bend. As the road would have it, some of these views took my breath away. Taking us on the road, Smith lets Augustine speak to each of these topics in successive chapters. We’re all searching for the same things: freedom, ambition, sex, mothers, friendship, enlightenment, story, justice, fathers, death, and homecoming. What we see is that for all our modernity, we’re as ancient as they come. He writes, “In a way, it’s a book Augustine has written about you.” If anything, this book, while giving bits and pieces of Augustine’s life and work, is a book written for the modern age and the modern questions of modern people. This isn’t, as Smith clearly states, a biography of Augustine. He’s “a prodigal who’s already been where you think you need to go” (xi).Ĭhanneling Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Smith takes the form of Sal Paradise, giving us the view from the backseat, interpreting what’s taking place in front of him between two new friends. He wants to hop in the car with us, but he’s bringing a friend along for the ride. Smith wants us to see in his latest book, On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. He didn’t have a car, but that didn’t stop him from going, and he has something to say to all who wander. ![]() Have you been there? The 4th century Bishop of Hippo, Saint Augustine, has. I was looking for a place to be, knowing the place I was wasn’t it. ![]() I wasn’t trying to arrive I was going because I couldn’t stay where I was. Where was I going all those nights? Nowhere, really. In Lexington, Kentucky, there is a lot of open space. As a freshman in college, I would take long drives. ![]()
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