The Restless Heart

“Thou madest me for Thyself and my heart is restless until it repose in Thee.” -St. Augustine

“Thou madest me for Thyself and my heart is restless until it repose in Thee.” Though we may question the first clause of St. Augustine’s familiar little prayer, the second clause contains a kernel of truth: the heart is indeed a restless

organ, both literally and figuratively. In the case of our actual hearts, ceaselessly beating away in our chests, we are thoughtlessly glad that that is the case. We rejoice in our mindless ignorance of the heart’s restlessness. On consideration, we certainly do not look forward to the day when our hearts are completely at rest.

Figuratively speaking, however, we may be less content that the yearnings of the human heart often seem to find little rest. The restlessness that many of us feel at the emotional center of ourselves can be a troubling burden. We long for surcease from our constant yearning and striving and desiring, but often the heart pushes us onward, unrelenting.

One of the definitions of restless fits this existential reality; when we say we are restless we mean that we are “uneasy in body and spirit.” This uneasiness seems to be rooted in an inability to find satisfaction either in our actions or in our deepest sense of ourselves. It is a disease which we are experiencing. We are impatient, but we know not for what. There is a disturbing quality about this kind of restlessness, for we may not be able to determine its cause, or its goal.

As Augustine recognized, this restlessness at the core of ourselves, in what we have come, metaphorically, to call the heart, is a deeply religious questioning which seeks a deeply religious reply. Our longings for peace--for reconciliation within ourselves and with others, and with God, a calm center in the midst of the storm of human challenges and dilemmas--are a direct response to the profound restlessness that we feel.

And this restlessness is more than just a feeling. Modern physics has taught us, in the words of a familiar Unitarian Universalist hymn, that there is “a deep unrest seeth[ing] at the core of all existing things.” Nothing it seems, is at rest. The particles making up the most solid looking objects in the universe are in constant, unceasing motion. Whether this motion is order, or chaos,--is still an open question. No wonder that we, too, may come to feel that we are in perpetual motion. We desperately long to act on the advice of an old roadside sign: Rest awhile and give thanks. If only we could. We understand implicitly the truth of the prophet Isaiah' s claim, that “in returning and rest you shall be saved.” But how?

Not that restlessness is, in and of itself, necessarily all negative. I suspect that it is the force behind much that we call good. It is what moves us to the fulfillment of love, and drives us to accomplishment. It is the source all calling and vocation. It is that which will not allow us to be quiet or settled, content with the status quo, but moves us onward toward the potential of greater things and of a wider vision. It is that dissatisfaction that we may feel about the condition of our lives, about the places where we find ourselves, about our states of mind or body, about our jobs, which pushes us toward healthy change. It is restlessness which eases us to seek the fresh and the new, and to expand our cramped horizons. Restlessness is the source of the process which moves the universe on its way, and, if we accept the premise of some theologians, moves it and us further along in the direction of the human and the humane. It is the source of our instinct toward wholeness and health. And to lose it is to die to ourselves, as I have known a few people, tragically, to do.

But the music of our lives, like the music of the masters, requires stops and rests to be made sensible. There must be pauses along the way, in the midst of the unfolding musical line, to give it its form and rhythm. Without those pauses, music quickly descends to cacophony. Our lives need form and rhythm, too, and for the same reasons. We need our times of what poet Wendell Berry calls “resting in the grace of the world”; he writes in “The Peace of Wild Things,”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

As well as being an amazingly creative force, restlessness, as F. Scott Fitzgerald recognized in his great novel of the American Dream, The Great Gatsby, can be an incredibly destructive force. Restlessness is a major theme of the novel. In it, Tom and Daisy Buchanan are restless people, uprooted midwesterners; and, as we learn in the novel, they are careless and destructive people, too. Their actions will directly result in three deaths.

Restlessness has been one of the most significant characteristics, for good and ill, of the American psyche. The westward migration, symbolized by the Prairie Schooner, was a symptom of our American restlessness. In its relentless drive our restlessness destroyed whole civilizations, and it has put whole ecosystems at risk. Restlessness is what drove the pioneers, the belief that the grass is always greener just around the bend, or over the next hill. In Ole Rolvaag’s great pioneer novel Giants in the Earth, it is the force that drives Per Hans a ever westward, and drives his wife insane. At the novel’s end, Per Hansa is literally frozen on his skis, with his gaze fixed on the ever receding western horizon. Restlessness built clipper ships, and made us the culture of the automobile. It has fueled our greatest accomplishments and our most tragic failures.

On a personal level, too, restlessness can drive us to be dissatisfied with what we are and have: our jobs, our homes, our relationships.

Perhaps what we need to cultivate in the face of our inherent restlessness, both positive and negative, is some of the detachment of the Zen Buddhist. My colleague Jim Ford writes, “I remember once seeing a small sign on the wall of the bookstore in the San Francisco Zen Center. It read, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ . . . We do need to stop all our rushing about--once in a while--and just stand there, just sit there, just be present. The reasons for doing this ‘just being’ are many, but at base will reveal what we were born for. To ‘just be,’ if only for an instant, can show us the meaning and purpose of our lives. Indeed, this insight can give us a compass to guide us for the whole of those lives. So how do we learn to be, even for an instant?”

Jim’s answer is cryptic, as perhaps such answers must always be. He quotes the fourteenth century mystic Lal Ded, who wrote, “To learn the scriptures is easy, to live them, hard. The search for the Real is no simple matter. Deep in my looking, the last words vanished. Joyous and silent, the waking that met me there.” Perhaps a simpler answer can be found in some words of a former parishioner of mine from Maine, who always counseled her friends to “grow where you are planted.” It’s advice that I have not always heeded as well as I might, but in which I now see much truth.

Or perhaps the end of our restlessness must always be paradox, for to simply be is to be without all the baggage that defines us as individual human beings. In a sense it is to die, which defeats the purpose. All our lives we struggle toward autonomy, and here is someone telling us that our struggles have been for naught. To be at rest, as T. S. Eliot wrote in his mystical Four Quartets, is to find ourselves at “the still point of the turning world.” It is to be out of space and time, set loose from all that defines us and the world we live in. It will last, if it happens at all, only for an instant, for as Eliot later says, “Mankind cannot bear too much reality.”

Perhaps the only real hope for the restless heart is that final repose of Augustine’s prayer. But I choose to think that we can at least hold the restlessness at bay, if only for a few moments at a time. I think that is why we come to church; it is why we pray and meditate and seek moments of peace in the natural world. It is what we look for in our most intimate relationships, in the words that we write and the songs that we sing and the pictures we paint. We cannot fully escape the restlessness of our hearts or of our world, but we can become more aware of it. We can strive to become more fully present and more fully alive to the beauty of the moment in which we find ourselves, recognizing, as the late Jane Kenyon did in one of her poems, that it could be otherwise:

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

In closing, let me encourage you, in Charles Stephen’s words, “to fill your days with the nourishment that feeds you.” For in those restless moments, when fear awakens you, and sleep won’t come, you may find peace in a line of poetry, in the recollection of a special place, in the touch of a friend; a little rest in the midst of the music which is your life, giving it order and form, and not least, a touch of beauty. So be it.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock