The Restless Love
The second semester has started here in the seminary, and I’ve started my course in Fundamental Theology. While I have taught this course a number of times before, a couple of otherwise familiar pieces of material did jump out in fresh ways to me.
The first moment came when showing the seminarians a couple of short clips from the move Stranger than Fiction, in which the protagonist, Harold Crick, hears his life being narrated and learns of his imminent death, which in turn sets in train a process of searching outwards for the source of his story, as well as searching inwards for the meaning and purpose of his otherwise very controlled existence. I made a throwaway remark that this Stranger than Fiction was an incredibly Augustinian movie, as the inbreaking of a voice that transcended his own lifeworld, in spite of (or maybe because of) the ostensibly ill-tiding of his imminent death, lit a spark of desire for find the truth of his life. It was a desire that made him press against the borders of his otherwise small curated existence, and expanding the horizons of his life that he never thought existed. I noted how he became aware of what Luigi Giussani called in his The Religious Sense a “disproportion” in two senses.
The first was a disproportion between the expanded life he could have lived all this while - a normal life - and the so called “normal” life marked by frequent measurement of every brush stroke, step to the bus, tying of his necktie and so on. The second was a disproportion between the desire sparked within him to find the answer to the question of his existence (or more accurately the end of it), and the capacity of that world to furnish the answer. This, Giussani says is the disproption, the “The inability of the answer to satisfy the constitutive needs of our self” (49). In the face of this chasm between the infinitude of what we desire and what the finitude of the cosmos to satisfy them, something from beyond is needed to step into the breach and satisfy this desire.
Related to this first point about the disproportion is the theme of restlessness. Unsurprisingly, the notice of his imminent death sets Harold on a somewhat comical spiral, but it is a spiral that is the manifestation of an internal sense of restlessness, one that was hinted at at the very beginning by the narrator’s remark that his controlled life was also one characterised by a deep loneliness. The restlessness was there from the beginning, and it was set into high gear when he sought to find the proper response to his impending end.
Against this backdrop, I made the remark that this movie was a thoroughgoingly Augustinian masterpiece, for it highlighted Augustine’s famous point at the beginning of his Confessions, concerning the heart being restless. This restlessness was not a detraction from our human nature, but was constitutive of us as desiring and loving beings. Restlessness was not a negation of love. Rather as Pope Francis put it in his 2013 address to the Augustinian order:
Restlessness is also love, always seeking the good of others, of loved ones, with that intensity that also leads to tears . . . The restlessness of the quest for the truth, of the quest for God, becomes the restlessness of always coming to know Him better, and of going out of oneself in order to make Him known to others and this is the restlessness of love
Put another way, restlessness is not something that we should try to sweep aside, for it might give us important revelations concerning what we want and who we are (and more importantly, what we want and who we are as Christians). This has been expanded upon by the podcast The Pilgrim Soul, who put out some time ago an excellent episode on the theme of restlessness, which I highly recommend that you listen to in full.
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