“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
Perhaps you’ve heard this line before; this quote is how Augustine of Hippo begins his spiritual autobiography, Confessions. My translation at home, not quite as poetic, has this: “You made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”
Fra Angelico: The Conversion of Saint Augustine, circa 1430s. Musée Thomas Henry.
If anyone would know about restlessness, it would be Augustine. Born into a landowning family in what is now Algeria, Augustine lived a life of restlessness, always searching for something new thought to titillate his brain, something shiny to catch his eye, something more appealing, be it food or women or music. He dived headfirst into astrology, into rhetoric, into philosophy, rapaciously consuming and seeking a way to be fulfilled. Augustine kept up this manic dash until finally, after over a decade of running, after a decade of loss and heartbreak and wrestling and searching, Augustine surrendered to God.
In that surrender, after years of torturing himself, Augustine finds peace. Eleven years later, as he reflects on his journey, he writes: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
Paul, sitting in the Aeropagus arguing with the Athenians, might have found this line useful. While waiting in Athens for Timothy and Silas, Paul spent his time in the synagogue, arguing about Jesus. Soon Paul’s bold claims about Jesus attracted the attention of the Athenians, who were renowned in their time for their acquisitive desire for knowledge. Luke tells us that the denizens of Athens would “spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.” The Athenians’ legendary and restless curiosity is piqued, and so Paul is led to the Aeropagus, where Paul begins to speak.
Paul knows his audience, so Paul isn’t going to start with the Hebrew Prophets, or Abraham, or Moses. Instead, Paul starts big, with all of creation. The God who created the heavens and earth, and all things in it, this God is the giver of life itself. This God is the exact opposite of an idol made by human hands, this God is the God who made human hands. And this God made all people with the intrinsic desire to search for God, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for God, and find God.
“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
What Paul understands, and what Augustine learned through his anguish, is that the part of us that longs for MORE is part of what it means to be human. That burning ache, that Long Loneliness, that yearning, that hunger, that thirst is built into our humanity. We can’t hide from it. We can’t run from it. Our need to search is as much as part of us as the color of our hair, our eyes, our laugh. We are always restless, searching for something to fill that God-shaped hole right in the middle of our heart.
The trouble is, nothing will fill that hole if that something is not God. Because there’s nothing like God. Nothing we can possess, nothing we can do could possibly be enough. Perhaps we’re sated for a while, but the yearning comes back, and stronger. When we try to smother our restlessness with food or booze or sex or work, we disorder our lives to catastrophic effect. Filling the God-shaped hole with a thing or activity leads to idolatry and addiction.
When we try to fill the hole with a person, it’s a disaster. Because even our best relationships, our very best and deepest and most meaningful relationships, cannot fill the God-shaped hole in our hearts. Our parents, our children, our beloved friends, even our partners -- in the end, none of them can fill that spot, because none of them are God. When we ask them to be God for us, we ask too much of them. Our relationships, instead of strengthening, break down. We damage ourselves, and we damage them.
Despite endlessly feeding our greedy appetites, despite our best efforts to make others who we need them to be, still our souls aches for something more, because there’s no thing or relationship that can fill the void of the Creator who called you forth out of nothingness into Life, who sustains you with every breath, who redeems you for Love.
“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
God made us so that we would search for God, and find God. As Paul reminds the Athenians, and as Augustine makes his confessions and tells his story, together they say the same thing: God is not far from each one of us. God is close. As close as breath, because as Paul says, “in God we live and move and have our being.”
This is not to say that the journey to find God does not have dangers, toils, or snares, this is not to say the journey is not a perilous climb up a Seven Storey Mountain, this is not to say that journey does not often feel like a kind of existential Blind Man’s Bluff, as we grope in the darkness for God. In this life, we will only see in the mirror, darkly.
But when we search, when we reach out into the unknown for the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, our very own creator, when we seek to fill a God-sized hole in our heart with God, our other desires are right-sized. We are set free from the tyranny of idolatry to rest in the living God. And when God is our primary relationship, our other relationships are rightly ordered. Our relationships, free from the pressure of fulfilling impossible wants and desires, are able to flourish. We’re set free to accept love we can be given by those who love us, and we’re set free to love others the way they need to be loved.
So know that you were made by God to search for God. And when we fill our heart with God, we can rest in God. Because “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”