Monica's thirty years of tears
Augustine's mother
Monica is the patron saint of mothers with difficult children, and she earned it.
She was born into a Christian family in North Africa, married to a pagan man named Patricius who had a violent temper. She prayed for his conversion for years. He converted before he died. She turned her attention to their son Augustine.
For thirty years she prayed for Augustine. She followed him to Rome when he left Africa without telling her — he lied to her about his travel plans to escape her presence, and she arrived at the port to find the ship already gone. She sat on the dock and wept through the night. Then she got on the next ship.
In Milan she attaches herself to Bishop Ambrose, who becomes the intellectual companion Augustine needs to complete his journey toward the faith. She and Ambrose clearly respect each other enormously. She asks his advice on a fasting practice she brought from Africa. He gently redirects her.
She is in Milan when Augustine converts in the garden. She is in Milan when he is baptized. She weeps — but differently.
On their way home to Africa, she and Augustine stop at Ostia, the port of Rome. They have a conversation about heaven — about what eternal life might feel like, about whether anything in human experience touches it — that Augustine records in the Confessions as the most beautiful conversation of his life. They are leaning out a window together, looking at a garden.
Nine days later, Monica becomes ill. She dies at fifty-six, in a foreign city, far from home. She tells her sons not to worry about where her body is buried. God knows where to find her.
“Nothing is far from God, and I have no fear that he will not know where to find me at the resurrection.”
— Monica, on her deathbed, as recorded by Augustine in Confessions IX.11
“You number my wanderings. You put my tears into your bottle. Aren't they in your book?”
Monica prayed for thirty years without seeing the answer. She followed her son across the Mediterranean. She sat on docks weeping. She kept going.
We do not know what her interior life was like in those thirty years — whether she ever doubted, whether she ever despaired, whether she ever considered stopping. Augustine does not tell us. What he tells us is that she kept praying.
The bishop who told her that the son of so many tears could not perish was right. But he could not have known he was right when he said it. He was saying it to a woman sitting in front of him with no evidence except her tears and her persistence.
For whom are you praying that you cannot see the answer yet? Do not stop.