Even saints sometimes need a loving, merciful hand to guide them on the right path.
Years ago, actor-director Hayes Gordon ran an acting workshop for young people at the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney. A teenage girl delivered a monologue she had made up in which she told off her father for interfering in her life. As an experiment, Gordon asked the girl to invent a new monologue, from the father’s point of view. As the girl began to deliver this father-to-daughter talk, she started to cry.
‘Why are you crying?’ Gordon asked her.
‘Because I just realised how much my father loves me’, said the girl.
The righteous interference of parents, so hated by youth, can be God’s mercy at work in their lives.
This was certainly the case in the relationship of Monica and her son Augustine in the fourth century AD, but to Augustine, Monica was no more than an interfering parent.
Augustine’s sin was a fundamental one: pride. His career as a philosopher and teacher were both steered by a determination to prove himself superior to his fellow men and women. He was obsessed by an alternative religion, Manichaeism, which promised its adherents a superior existence based on a level of intellectual insight which only a few could attain. Manichaeism demanded celibacy of its highest adherents. But Augustine had a mistress, and he also had affairs with other women as well. He was not prepared to be celibate, so he could only reach the lower order of the Manichaean hierarchy; he was one of the ‘hearers’ of wisdom, not one of the elite.
St Monica had already converted her hot-tempered husband Patricius to Christianity when she turned her full attention to saving Augustine from his pointless pursuit of self-glory. Monica understood that being a Christian did not rest upon secret wisdom and higher status; the chosen in Christianity are those who receive God’s merciful love with humility. ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner’ (Luke 18:13), was a prayer Augustine was very far from being able to utter, and he could not accept that ‘The first shall be last and the last shall be first’ (Matthew 20:16).
Monica would stop at nothing. When Augustine left for Rome without telling her, Monica followed. She consulted priests and bishops and she prayed and wept for God’s merciful salvation of her son. One bishop famously told her: ‘It is impossible that the son of so many tears should perish.’
Augustine’s professional career blossomed in Italy, but Monica could not have cared less; the empty rewards of pride were nothing compared to the merciful love of Christ on the cross.
Her persistence paid off. Augustine became fascinated by the teaching of a Christian bishop, St Ambrose, and in his masterful autobiography Confessions, Augustine finally came to write these words to God:
‘You are merciful; I stand in need of mercy.... All my hope lies only in your great mercy!’
Thanks to the closest relationship a man can have apart from with his God, Augustine found what his mother had known he needed all along.
St Monica
332-387 CE
Feast day: 27 August
Patron saint: Married women, difficult marriages, disappointing children
Peter Fleming is the author of Would I Like Jesus? (Paulist Press 2015)