When the white smoke announced habemus Papa, I wanted to learn more about Leo XIV–the man who (like me!) grew up in Illinois and served as a missionary in Peru. I searched up the new Pope’s order: the Augustinians, and discovered that they live in community following the Rule of St. Augustine of Hippo and serve as priests and educators around the world.  As I learned more, this Augustinian page caught me up short when it spoke of the “charism of restlessness.”  Charism means “gift.” Catholic orders adopt the word to speak of their collective vocation and distinctive personality.  Who knew that restlessness—which I’ve seen in a negative light—might be considered something positive, even a gift?  

I’ve been restless my whole life, but maybe God sometimes uses restlessness for good.

The Augustinian order’s charism of restlessness originates in St. Augustine’s writing.  In the Confessions, Augustine’s spiritual autobiography, he leads with this insightful prayer: “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (I.1).  These may be Augustine’s most famous words.  I’ve always taken Augustine’s restless-heartedness as something to be interrogated and subdued.  In my mind, restlessness is the curse that holds us back from settling into God’s happiness.  That’s the way Augustine uses it.

And that’s how I’ve felt it.  I’ve been long-acquainted with restlessness.  My whole adult life, I’ve been circled by some rangy, coyote-toothed longing for something more.  I have searched for the next thing, wondered about the farther horizon.  Not long ago, I confessed to a friend: “I’m too restless.  It’s something I’m working on.” 

But maybe the Augustinians are on to something and there are ways that restlessness can point through to virtue—can even be anointed by the Holy Spirit as a charism.  Cast in this more positive light, restlessness might be more like a drive, a hunger, a desire to push out into the deeper waters.  

I think of a scene at the beginning of the gospel.  Jesus asks a pair of John’s restless disciples: “What are you looking for?” (John 1:38).  It’s an invitation—to wonder, to take a step.  For those disciples, the question was actually a calling to apprenticeship to Jesus.  

For me, the invitation in my restlessness has been many things: A hunger for something.  Further.  Beyond this now.  A fly bite on my brain.  And like them, Jesus’ question has been a call to deeper apprenticeship to him.

Restlessness drives me to explore.  I want to know more, think things through, try new approaches to challenges in the church.  “The love of Christ urges us on,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 5:14).

Restlessness awakens a hunger for more of Jesus in me.  Jesus promised life in him in abundance (John 10:10).  Most of us can imagine a life with “more” easily enough.  But it seems to me that the life of abundance that Jesus is describing has to do with a life that is “filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19).  It’s a life that tastes and sees that the Lord is good and won’t settle, won’t be satisfied, because to encounter Jesus is to long for more of Jesus.  That restlessness is what led me to discover a depth of meaning at the Lord’s table and encounter the living Christ there.

Restlessness drives me to write.  It’s what has sparked me to question and rethink how we approach ministry in our unique settings.  

In those ways, maybe restlessness has been my charism too.

Yet, even the gift of restlessness has to be grounded—in life in the community of faith, in worship, in prayer, ultimately: in relationship with God.  Unformed restlessness deforms us.  Augustine was right: some way, somehow, our wandering hearts have to find their home in God our only refuge.

I’ve been a restless-hearted seeker.  Maybe you have too.

Could God be using your restlessness to draw out something good?