Within our hearts is a longing for something, a desire to find that missing puzzle piece and fix it into place. It’s not likely that we already know what it is. If we do, we may occasionally have moments where we question if it truly is the fulfillment of our longing.

However identifiable or indescribable the thing in question is, our hearts nonetheless send us forth on a lifetime’s journey toward something beyond ourselves, one that we hope ends in accomplishment, satisfaction, and fulfillment.

Augustine of Hippo, Steve Perry, and Bruce Springsteen have, in their own way, addressed this inherent longing within all of our hearts, wrestling with the sense of incompletion and desire that characterizes the human experience.

For Augustine, it is restlessness. For Perry, it is foolishness. For Springsteen, it is hunger. For all three, it is the longing of the heart that spurs the soul and thrusts one forward into the complexity of living.

Rest provides us with a sense of grounding, an opportunity for reflection, and some semblance of certainty. Without it, we remain caught up in the tempest of everyday chaos, unable to find respite, and without the opportunity for reflection.

Imagine if we went about our business without having slept for days on end, or a marathoner continuing to run long after the competition finished. In both cases, we would physically and mentally suffer, struggling to maintain our sense of sanity and stability, let alone lack the stamina to carry on. Without rest, we would eventually collapse, losing our sense of the world and our very selves.

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.

Augustine of Hippo

In this proclamation at the heart of Christian anthropology, Augustine of Hippo—bishop, theologian, and certified sinner—identifies that it is God who is that ‘missing puzzle piece,’ that something which we long for in order to reach fulfillment.

However, I am not so much interested in Augustine’s theological identification of the remedy for the heart’s restlessness as I am in how he describes the heart’s condition as such. It is in the uncertainty and chaos of restless ness that a person lacks grounding and stability. To employ scripture, one can liken this of Jesus’ parable about the two men who built houses along the sea—one was on the sand, while the other on the rocks.

Augustine himself knew of what it meant to live a restless life. Prior to his conversion, he was a ravel rouser, womanizer, and alcoholic among other things. He sought pleasure, fulfillment, and meaning in all these things, yet they never provided him rest in the fullest sense of the word. The things which give our very souls rest are the things that are, in the end, beyond the material aspects of this world.

We find rest in the things that transcend economic status, educational level, ethnicity and language, age, gender and sexuality, religion and ideology. Namely, it is love, hope, and mercy in their purest forms that give us rest. These manifest in a myriad of ways, for these are not unattainable, distant concepts, but embodied realities that bridge the visible and the invisible, the finite with the infinite. We can experience these through a conversation with a neighbor, an embrace of an estranged relative, listening to a song, or walking in a park.

It is in the things without price tage or life-spans that our hearts will find rest in.

A fool is one who cries out to something that may or may not be there—whose nonsensical demeanor and non-normative disposition draws unwanted attention alongside disrupting others. Foolishness is characterized by impulsivity, naivety, humor, recklessness, and stupid. The image of a court jester may come to mind—one whose very presence and existence is intended to bring about amusement through humor.

Therefore, to be identified as a fool is no compliment. But is being a fool really that bad? Is it any harm to, on occasion, be foolish? Earlier, I identified foolishness as being, among other things, non-normative—going against social norms and cultural expectations. When understood in light of this, there’s an opportunity for us to recognize some merit in being a fool.

If being foolish means that we approach something in a way that others do not, and engage with something with a mindset that others find strange, then being a fool may be more liberating than we initially thought. Rather than being an outcast branded with a scarlet letter, we could truly be on to something.

Foolish heart, hear me calling,
Stop before you start falling;
Foolish heart, heed my warning,
You’ve been wrong before,
Don’t be wrong anymore.

Steve Perry

Sometimes, we may be cautioned by others not to follow our hearts out of a fear that our emotions and desires will lead us in the wrong direction. Perry himself exhibits caution toward his own heart, being weary of following it again in light of where it has taken him in the past.

Resisting the aversion that we have built up from past experiences is difficult, especially when those same experiences left us worse off than prior to them. But as our heart beckons us, we continue the exchange by respond to it, recognizing that there are many elements within our very beings at play when it comes to longing and fulfillment.

If we’re led to something believing that it will be the fulfillment of our heart’s desire, we may fall—get in too deep to something that ends up being more harmful than healthy. We don’t want to be wrong, especially when the stakes are so high, when our very lives are in question.

When following our heart, we run the risk of being seen as fools. But sometimes, that risk is worth it—for if being a fool means to experience something that others can’t, seeing something that others don’t, and engaging with the world in ways that are non-normative, then maybe each of us has acted foolish in our journey toward fulfillment. And that’s okay.

This is not a call to be outright nonsensical, flippant, impulsive, or crass, but to be forgiving enough to ourselves when we stumble, struggle, and falter. We are as imperfect as the court jester, but that does not mean that our willingness orpursuits are futile. We may be fools, by our own self-deception or by the world’s deception, but no matter the case, we cn embrace our foolishnes knowing that developing wisdom and knowledge will only help us protect our own hearts.

When on an empty stomach, it’s hard for us to focus on tasks, maintain our energy, and remain in a good mood. Without the sustenance food provides us, it’s difficult for us to do anything. No wonder why many of us, when hungry, scour our refrigerators, pantries, bags, or cars for something to satisfy our hunger.

Hunger is as inward as it is outward. When we hear our stomachs grumble, the hormone ghrelin is produced and notifies our brain that we’re hungry. When we search cabinets and drawers for the slightest morsel of food, we are thinking about the satisfaction we would feel upon finally eating something.

These experiences are common to all of us as humans—we have all been hungry at countless points throughout our lives, and will be in the future as each day passes. Yet, the hunger of the heart is likewise something shared by all yet difficult to satisfy.

Everybody’s got a hungry heart,
Everybody’s got a hungry heart;
Lay down your money and you play your part,
Everybody’s got a h-h-hungry heart.

Bruce Springsteen

By describing this longing in terms of hunger, Springsteen recognizines that before we endeavor to search for that thing which will satiate our longing hearts, there is the recognition of absence—that we are, in some sense, incomplete due to a lack of something.

When we go about our lives searching for fulfillment and meaning, we engage in that same recognition as when our stomachs growl and hormones kick in upon developing hunger. There is something in us at this point that is astir, beckoning us to face it head on and so something about it. It is in that recognition of absence that we then desire presence.

Springsteen likewise recognizes the universality of hunger. Beyond the basic biological fact that human beings require food to properly function and develop hunger when lacking it, Springsteen understands that we experience absence just as much as we desire presence. Through presence, the once empty void is filled—one’s hunger is satisfied.

In hunger, we can seek out things that will immediately satisfy it; but if we do not excersise enough caution, we could be injesting junk food. Pursuit of the short-term does not often translate into sustainability in the long-term. When hungry, we must have some sense as to what is of the highest, genuine good—the things that will last, enduring to the end so as to enrich us throughout our lives. Yet Springteen aim is not to point to the pantry to show us what to get, but to point toward all the other people in the same state as us: experiencing absense and searching for presence, because “everybody’s got a hungry heart.”

I’m not at all dissatisfied with Perry and Springsteen’s lack of identifying an antidote to the longing of the heart in contrast to Augustine’s bold assertion. On the contrary, I’m deeply consoled by the recognition of this struggle at the heart of the human experience by these three figures.

By placing their fingers on the pulse of this subject, Augustine, Perry, and Springsteen speak to their fellow humans are those who have, are, and continuing to journey toward that something which will quell the desires of their hearts.

These three men are not prophetic, for they did not reveal something entirely new to the world, but their words serve as mirrors with which we can see ourselves and others in light of our common experience.

Indeed, we have restless, foolish, and hungry hearts.