Saint Monica (TLC, 2)
Today is the feast of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo. St. Monica is (if you will allow it) my self-appointed patron saint. She is an inspiration and a sacred exemplar of Christian fidelity, maternal love, and undying hope. A couple years back Matthew Rothaus Moser, a theologian at Azusa Pacific, wrote this on Twitter:
Theology hot take: *Confessions* is less a narrative of Augustine’s search for God than it is a narrative of the efficacy of Monica’s prayerful tears.
I retweeted that with the following small thread:
Print this out and plaster it on every mirror, wall, and doorframe of your house. God help us parents to pray with one percent of the blood, sweat, and tears of St. Monica.
This supposed hot take should be so cool as to be frozen solid. St. Monica is the human hero of the Confessions: the exemplar, the faithful one, the stubborn widow pestering the judge, Abraham haggling with the Lord: tear-stained incarnation of irresistible grace in fallen form.
I've shared this before, and I always share it whenever I teach the Confessions: Re-reading the book after becoming a parent—sitting in a little YDS second-floor study room—I wept like a newborn baby when I got to the end of Book VIII. God heard her prayers. All grace. Pure joy.
Come by my office, and you'll find icons of St. Monica on my door, on my wall, at my window. (Sitting in my study at home, I'm looking at an icon of her as I write.) When I grow up I want to be like St. Monica.
A few months later, on the feast of St. Monica in 2019, I retweeted that thread with the following appended comment:
A thread from last month for the feast of St. Monica: mother of St. Augustine, soldier of prayer, and my own (alas, self-appointed) patron saint. Jesus spoke of her in Luke 18; she is the persistent widow incarnate.
Remember and celebrate St. Monica this day, and give thanks for her witness and for her tears, which by the Spirit’s grace made her wayward son a son of God. Like Hannah, the one thing she loved most in the world she gave over to the Lord, whom she loved even more; she knew her boy needed the church as a mother, not only herself. And what she gave up, she received back one hundredfold.
Why, after all, did St. Augustine write what may be the most important, influential, and beautiful work of Christian literature in the church’s history? Answer:
My Lord, my God, inspire your servants, my brothers, your sons, my masters, to whose service I dedicate my heart, voice, and writings, that all who read this book may remember at your altar Monica your servant and Patrick her late husband, through whose physical bond you brought me into this life without my knowing how. May they remember with devout affection my parents in this transient light, my kith and kin under you, our Father, in our mother the Catholic Church, and my fellow citizens in the eternal Jerusalem. For this city your pilgrim people yearn, from their leaving it to their return. So as a result of these confessions of mine may my mother’s request receive a richer response through the prayers which many offer and not only those which come from me.
The Confessions exists to elicit the prayers of God’s people in perpetuity, on behalf of St. Monica and as an extension and fulfillment of her own prayers, while she was still on earth. So say a prayer today on her behalf; say a prayer especially for your children, as she did her only son. She’s in heaven now, all her earthly prayers answered, yet still (we may trust) praying without ceasing. For whom? For all God’s children still journeying toward their eternal home.
