The Tears of St. Monica

Editor’s Note: This is the fourteenth in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.

You did not choose me, but I chose you…” (John 15:16)                    

Despite all the steps people will insist on taking to create union with God, clearing away whole lumberyards of spiritual debris along the way, intimacy with God has never really been about us to begin with. Having a relationship with God is not something we do but rather Someone we receive. And it is He who takes the initiative. Even our prayers are prompted by Another. That is, when we do pray. Too often our prayer life is rather like those “enchanted cigarettes,” of which the writer Balzac speaks—that is, the books we hope someday to publish but never actually get around to writing.  

In other words, it’s not as if our prayers were like Shakespeare’s “bootless cries to heaven,” heartfelt but never answered; it’s that our cries are never sent at all. Or that our lament, as Hopkins writes, “Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.” It’s that we’re not sending any letters at all. 

Pascal was surely on to something when he told us that it was God Himself, “who instituted prayer in order to confer upon his creatures the dignity of becoming a cause”—that by our prayers, we literally cause things to happen. But unless the grace of God moves us to pray in the first place, we’re not going to cause anything to happen except maybe more sinning.

And the point of all this? I mean, what has this got to do with Augustine? Well, where did we last leave him? Sunk in the same Manichaean sinkhole he first dug himself into, that’s where. Nine long years, he tells us, “During which I wallowed deep in the mire and the darkness of delusion.” An unholy novena, you might say, from which there would appear to be no end in sight. After all, will a man caught in the grip of delusion even know how to pray, much less whether or not he needs to? The answer does not lie with Augustine who, for all his good intentions, appears far too prostrate to do anything, much less pray to God for release. But it does lie with his mother, who has not for a single minute ceased to pray for her errant son.

In fact, it is Monica whom we find at the heart of Book III. And thank heaven Augustine has the good sense to see it that way, as witness the following sentence set down right at the beginning of Chapter 11: “You sent down your help from above,” he exclaims, quoting Psalm 143, 

and rescued my soul from the depths of this darkness because my mother [emphasis added], your faithful servant, wept to you for me, shedding more tears for my spiritual death than other mothers shed for the bodily death of a son.

Indeed, so plentiful were her tears, Augustine adds, that in streaming down from her face they “watered the earth in every place where she bowed her head in prayer.” How else, he asks, can he account for the dream she had, “with which you (God) consoled her, so that she agreed to live with me and eat at the same table in our home,” despite having long refused to do so “because she loathed and shunned the blasphemy of my false beliefs”? And the dream? It was, quite simply, a vision of a smiling young man who, seeing her in tears for the sins of her son, tells her “to take heart for, if she looked carefully, she would see that where she was, there also was I.”

Augustine is much moved by this, knowing that “this chaste, devout, and prudent woman…never ceased to pray at all hours and to offer you the tears she shed for me.” But while the dream had infused her with renewed hope for her son, “she gave no rest to her sighs and her tears. Her prayers reached your presence,” he adds, quoting from Psalm 87, “and yet you still left me to twist and turn in the dark.”

Nevertheless, more help is on the way, which comes in the form of a bishop whom Monica had been urging to sit down with her son and simply refute all his errors. But he tells her that Augustine is not yet “ripe” enough for instruction. “‘Leave him alone,’ he said. ‘Just pray to God for him. From his own reading he will discover his mistakes and the depth of his profanity.’” She persists, however, with still more tears and entreaties, until the poor man, finally exhausted by her importunities, bursts out: “’Leave me and go in peace. It cannot be that the son of these tears should be lost.”  

“In later years,” writes Augustine at end of Book III, “as we walked together, she used to say that she accepted these words as a message from heaven.”

What a lesson in prayer we are given here! Revealing the gesture of the beggar, who, as Luigi Giussani never tired of telling us, becomes the chief, albeit hidden, protagonist of history. Because his arms remain forever outstretched, beseeching God for all that he does not have.  Entrusting his destiny to Another, knowing in faith that so heartfelt an appeal will not go unanswered. But especially when the cry for help comes from a broken and distraught mother, who knows herself powerless by human means to check the perversities of her wayward child.  

Not only does the example of Monica illustrate the power of prayer but it reaches into the very meaning of motherhood as well. In a beautiful little book written by Gertrud von Le Fort, which bears the inspired title The Eternal Woman, we read this sentence which casts the most luminous light upon this mystery, which begins at the moment the mother gives birth to her child: “As at the hour of birth the mother stakes her life without reserve for the child, so after its birth her life no longer belongs to herself, but to the child.” 

It is an act of self-giving, self-emptying, unsurpassed by any other human gesture. And it is more. It is nothing less than an act of total abandonment and trust, one that carries such a lively and mysterious sense of expectancy, of childlike confidence in a God who will not forsake us at the last, leaving us bereft and alone. The good bishop was spot on: “It cannot be that the son of these tears should be lost. “As the woman in giving birth carries life on into endlessness,” writes Le Fort, “so in her capacity of nurturing and sheltering life she injects into time an element of eternity.”

One wonders if mothers are aware of the sheer majesty and mystery of their calling, the sublime heights to which human love and divine grace have summoned them. How aware was Augustine, at the time, of the boundless radicality of the sacrifice his mother had made for him, for the salvation so many of her tears had fallen to obtain? 

Perhaps not yet, but realization is on the way.