On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts QUOTES

1 " This is not a book about Augustine. In a way, it’s a book Augustine has written about you. It’s a journey with Augustine as a journey into oneself. It’s a travelogue of the heart. It’s a road trip with a prodigal who’s already been where you think you need to go. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

2 " In Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel On the Road, the narrator Sal Paradise plays chronicler to the antics of the star of the story, Dean Moriarty, who is really the exemplar, the hero, the model. So just call me Sal. I’ve been on a ride with Augustine. Here’s what I’ve seen; here’s what he’s shown me (about myself); here’s why you might consider coming along. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

3 " One could say of Augustine what Leslie Jamison notes about Don Gately in Infinite Jest: He’s “no saint. That’s why he made salvation seem possible. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

4 " Do we tell ourselves we’re “just going” in order to guard against the disappointment of never arriving? Do we call the road “home” to avoid the pain of never being welcomed? "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

5 " Sometimes plausibility is pegged to a person. The turning point for Augustine was not an argument; it was Ambrose. What Ambrose said, what he taught and preached, was not insignificant. But what made a dent on Augustine's imagination was Ambrose's very being--what he represented in his way of life. Ambrose was a living icon of someone who integrated assiduous learning with ardent Christian faith. If to that point, based on his childhood experience, Augustine had concluded that Christians were simple, backward, and naive, the encounter with Ambrose was the destabilising experience of meeting someone with intellectual firepower who was also following Jesus. Even more than that, it was Ambrose's hospitality that prompted Augustine to reconsider the faith he'd rejected as unenlightened. What ultimately shifted Augustine's plausibility structures? Love. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

6 " The question isn't whether you're going to believe, but who; it's not merely about what to believe, but who to entrust yourself to. Do we really think humanity is our best bet? Do we really think we are the the answer to our problems, we who've generated all of them? The problem with everything from Enlightenment scientism to mushy Eat-Pray-Love-ism is us. If anything looks irrational, it's the notion that we are our own best hope. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

7 " identity is our name for being found by a story someone else told. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

8 " Rituals are not solutions. They don’t “fix” things. They are how we live with what we can’t fix, channels for facing up to our finitude, the way we try to navigate this vale of tears in the meantime. But precisely for that reason they can also be conduits of hope and rhythms of covenant. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

9 " You can still be living in your childhood bedroom and have departed for a distant country. You can play the role of the “good son” with a heart that roams in a twilight beyond good and evil. You can even show up to church every week with a voracious appetite for idols. Not all prodigals need a passport. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

10 " When you've realized that you don't even know yourself, that you're an enigma to yourself, and when you keep looking inward only to find an unplumbable depth of mystery and secrets and parts of yourself that are loathsome, then Scripture isn't received as a list of commands: instead, it breaks into your life as a light from outside that shows you the infinite God who loves you at the bottom of the abyss. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

11 " Resting in the love of God doesn’t squelch ambition; it fuels it with a different fire. I don’t have to strive to get God to love me; rather, because God loves me unconditionally, I’m free to take risks and launch out into the deep. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

12 " My yoke is kindly and my burden light” (Matt. 11:30). “Every other burden oppresses you and feels heavy, but Christ’s burden lifts you up; any other burden is a crushing weight, but Christ’s burden has wings.”33 Not only can you make it home; you can fly. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

13 " We cultivate indifference as a cocoon. We make irony a habit because the safety of maintaining a knowing distance works as a defense. If you can’t find what matters, conclude that nothing matters. If the hunger for home is always and only frustrated, decide “the road is life. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

14 " If Augustine spent half his life battling the heresy of Pelagianism—the pretension that the human will was sufficient to choose its good—it’s because he saw it as the great lie that left people enchained to their dissolute wills. And no one is more Pelagian than we moderns. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

15 " How to die is a question of how to live, but how to live is a matter of knowing how to love: how to find a love that isn't haunted by fear, a love that is stronger than death - figuring out how to love rightly and live lightly with all the mortal beauties of creation without despising or resenting their mortality either...

The hope of eternal life does not efface the desire to live - it is the fulfillment of the desire to live, to live in a way that we can never lose what we love. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

16 " Free choice is sufficient for evil, but hardly for good. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

17 " It is easy and natural to hate evil persons because they are evil,” Augustine replies, “but it is rare and holy to love those same persons because they are human beings. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

18 " There is no other place for correcting our conduct save in this life. . . . And so, out of love for the human race we are compelled to intercede on behalf of the guilty lest they end this life through punishment. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

19 " The attention of others is fickle. Domination of others is always temporary; you can’t win forever (just ask Rocky). Attainment is a goddess who quickly turns a cold shoulder. To aspire to friendship with God, however, is an ambition for something you could never lose. It is to get attention from someone who sees you and knows you and will never stop loving you. In short, it’s the opposite of fickle human attention, which is temporal and temperamental. God’s attention is not predicated on your performance. You don’t have to catch God’s notice with your display. He’s not a father you have to shock in order to jar his attention away from the game, crying out, “Look at me! Look at me!” God’s attention is a place where you can find rest and where, “in the father’s lap,” as Augustine later puts it, you don’t have to be worried about getting attention from anyone else.20 You can rest. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

20 " But I think she misses one of the ways fathers want to love their sons—by sharing wisdom, giving some guidance, owning fatherhood by offering insight for living. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts