Saint Monica

But as soon as a favorable wind rose in the dark of night, the ship hoisted its sails and sped out to sea, carrying her son toward faraway Rome, and leaving his aging mother alone on the sand with a prayer that God seemed not to have answered the way she had hoped.

That was one of the most painful wounds of Monica’s life. For years she had wept until she had no tears left, and still could not reach the heart of her wayward son. Later, when he had become a great bishop, Augustine himself, still deeply moved, told in his Confessions how he had deceived his mother.

In every page of her son’s book, Monica appears both strong and utterly fragile: she loved her son deeply, worried for him until her heart ached, and at times wanted to hold on to him with every last bit of her strength; and then, over a whole lifetime, she had to learn a lesson a thousand times harder than holding on: how to open her hands, and entrusting the child she loved most entirely to the mercy of God.

In that household there was an old nurse who had cared for Monica’s father when he was a small child. This old woman, whose name we do not know, firmly taught the children self-control, moderation and uprightness in the smallest things. Faith was handed on in simple ways like these, through a devoted servant’s care and everyday reminders, which people carry in their hearts like a family heirloom when they are grown, even if they no longer remember the face of the one who taught them.

When she grew up, Monica obeyed her parents and married Patricius, a local official who did not yet share the Christian faith. They had three children: Augustine, Navigius and a daughter. Augustine was born in 354, and the older he grew, the more he showed a brilliant intelligence that made his parents both proud and anxious.

Monica’s marriage was no bed of roses. Patricius was a man with a fiery temper, and unfaithful as well. Her mother-in-law, egged on by the servants, turned bitter toward her. Monica had to live patiently with deep differences of temperament and belief, right in her own home.

She kept a wise rule: when her husband was in a rage, she held her tongue and did not answer back a single word; once his anger had cooled, she would gently choose her words and explain. With her mother-in-law, she used kindness, patience and respect to melt away one suspicion after another. Behind that forbearance lay the endless hardship of a woman who wanted to keep her home together without letting hatred breed more hatred.

We admire her patience, and still grieve for the humiliations she bore. A family needs both people to share the effort and the responsibility; a woman’s endurance is never a debt she simply owes in order to be praised as virtuous.

Thanks to her steadfast example, Patricius opened his heart and received baptism near the end of his life, and died in peace around the year 371. Monica became a widow at about forty. But the stormiest days of her life, with her eldest son, were only just beginning.

Monica’s pain then was not simply seeing her son give up the habit of prayer; she was in anguish because the child of her own flesh was searching for happiness in illusions that in the end would leave only emptiness and ruin.

Waiting did not mean sitting calmly by. Her heart felt raw, as if rubbed with salt. Monica went to a holy bishop and begged him in tears to talk to Augustine and persuade him. Seeing that the young man was still too proud of all his book learning and not ready to listen, the bishop declined, and advised her to keep praying with perseverance.

When he saw her still kneeling at his feet, pleading with tears streaming down her face, the bishop was moved and said the words that became famous:

“Go in peace! The son of so many tears will never be lost!”

Monica clung to those words like a lifebuoy. Yet many long years still lay between that word of comfort and the day her son came back. There were long stretches with no outward sign at all that her son was changing his heart. She still had to get up each morning, light the fire, cook, go to market and live among others, carrying a bleeding wound in her heart that no one knew about.

Vietnamese mothers who have stayed up night after night praying the Rosary for a child who has strayed into gambling or addiction, or left the faith, understand Monica’s heart completely. They know the feeling of wanting to say one more word but fearing the child will storm off even farther, wanting to give advice but in the end only swallowing their tears and setting aside a bowl of rice, waiting for the child to come home.

In Milan she met the renowned bishop Ambrose. Augustine too was going to hear Saint Ambrose preach, at first only for his brilliant eloquence, but little by little he was moved by the spiritual depth of the word of God that he had once looked down on. Monica found in this bishop a firm support.

Even in her fifties, Monica never stopped learning and was always ready to bend. When she learned that Saint Ambrose did not allow the custom of bringing food and wine to eat and drink at the martyrs’ tombs, as had been the practice back home in North Africa, she obeyed at once and gave up the habit without a word of protest. The old mother who had prayed for so many years did not presume she knew everything; her faith had the suppleness of a soul that knew how to listen to the Church.

Among the faithful she was a presence of prayer and peacemaking. Augustine always remembered a beautiful virtue of his mother’s: when she heard two angry people speaking ill of each other, she never carried the bitter words of one into the ears of the other. She only chose good words, things that could draw them closer, to pass on. It is a small, hidden kind of charity, and how many homes and parishes today long for it.

At the Easter Vigil of 387 in the cathedral of Milan, Saint Ambrose baptized Augustine, together with his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius.

At the lodging there was a small window looking down on a quiet garden. Monica and Augustine stood leaning side by side at the window, talking together about the eternal life of the saints in heaven. Augustine tells how, in that conversation, mother and son seemed lifted above every beauty of this world to touch the Most High himself — the source of all good.

It is one of the gentlest and most moving images of a mother and her child: mother and son no longer arguing, no longer pulling against each other over who was right and who was wrong. The two stood side by side, at peace, looking in the same direction — something that, in all the decades before, had perhaps never once happened between them.

Monica said softly to her son:

“My son, as for me, nothing in this life holds me any longer. I had only one wish, to see you become a Christian before I closed my eyes, and God has granted it to me beyond anything I hoped for...”

The heart once wrung with anguish for her son was now completely free and at peace. She could love her son without needing to hold on to him for herself any longer.

Monica wept, felt helpless, grew impatient and wanted to hold her son tight. But she learned to correct herself, learned to listen, and learned to trust that her son belonged to God more deeply than he belonged to her.