Restless

“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” — Psalm 42:1 (KJV)

Most life stories begin with “I was born.” This one begins with a prayer. Augustine wrote the Confessions in his mid-forties, around the year 400, when he was already a bishop in North Africa. He did not write it to you. He wrote it to God, addressing him as “Thou” on almost every page, and you get to listen in. On the very first page he puts down the sentence the whole book hangs from:

“Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”

Hold on to that line. Everything that follows is that sentence acted out by a gifted, funny, ambitious and deeply restless young man.

He was born in 354 in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa (today Souk Ahras in Algeria). His mother, Monica, was a Christian. His father, Patricius, was not. Augustine doesn't remember being a baby, but he has watched babies, and he refuses to get sentimental about them: “Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother.” His verdict: “The weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence.” Babies are harmless because they are small, not because they are good.

Then came school, and school meant beatings. Little Augustine heard adults talk about a great God who could hear and help, so he prayed, “though small, yet with no small earnestness, that I might not be beaten at school.” He got beaten anyway, and his parents laughed about it. He is fair to both sides. He really was lazy, because he loved games more than lessons. But he noticed the hypocrisy too: “elder folks' idleness is called 'business'; that of boys, being really the same, is punished by those elders.”

He loved stories. He cried over Dido, the queen in Virgil's poem who killed herself when her lover sailed away, and looking back he finds that the saddest thing about the boy he was: he was “weeping the death of Dido for love to Aeneas, but weeping not his own death for want of love to Thee, O God.” Meanwhile he was lying to his tutors and parents, stealing food from the family table to buy his way into other boys' games, and cheating to win. “And is this the innocence of boyhood?” he asks. “Not so, Lord, not so.” The same sins, he says, just move up a size: from nuts, balls and pet sparrows to gold, land and power.

Yet he ends his childhood chapter by thanking God for the boy. That child loved truth, “hated to be deceived, had a vigorous memory, was gifted with speech, was soothed by friendship.” All of that was good. The problem was where he went looking: “For it was my sin, that not in Him, but in His creatures—myself and others—I sought for pleasures, sublimities, truths, and so fell headlong into sorrows, confusions, errors.”

You probably know the restless feeling. It's the reason you open an app, close it, and open it again. Augustine's claim is that the restlessness is not a fault in you to be fixed with more stuff. It is a homing signal. You were made for God, and nothing smaller will hold your weight.

One thing to do this week: one evening, notice the moment you reach for something to fill a quiet minute. Stop and ask yourself honestly: what am I actually hungry for right now? Then pray Augustine's first line in your own words: “You made me for yourself, and I'm restless until I rest in you.”