Memorial of Saint Monica
Mother – Saint Monica
If the date of Mother's Day was set according to the calendar of liturgical memorials, this day should fall on August 27. Because among all canonized mothers it was she who was the most persistent against logic and hope.
I cannot express in words how much she loved me - wrote her son years later, over whom she shed a sea of tears.
Saint Monica (332–387) did not have an easy life. She was married young to a pagan who turned out to be an unfaithful husband and a man prone to anger. The hostile mother-in-law became an additional cross. With patience and wisdom, Monica was able to tame her husband's temperament and win the favor of her mother-in-law. She converted her husband, who was baptized just before his death. She remained a widow for the rest of her life, preoccupied with the care for her children. She had three of them: a son Navigius, a daughter whose name we do not know, and a son Augustine. Augustine caused her the most worries, but it was he who gave her the most beautiful monument in his "Confessions".
Young Augustine looked for truth in sects and fashionable philosophical trends, and for worldly happiness in concubinage. His Mother suffered. She turned tears into prayer. Augustine remembers a moment when a serious illness struck him. Even in danger of death, he did not ask for baptism. Years later, he judges himself that he has acted like a jester. He confesses that his mother's love saved him. “If I had died in this state, my mother's heart would never stop bleeding after such a blow. I cannot express in words how much she loved me and how much more she suffered in giving me a spiritual life than when she gave me into the world. Could you, God, who is generous in mercy, despise the broken and humiliated heart of a virtuous and prudent widow? Could you despise her tears, could you not hear her prayers, in which she begged you not for silver and gold, not for any changeable and transient goods, but for the salvation of her own son’s soul? After all, by your grace she was who she was. You couldn't refuse her help, Lord”.
Monica's anxiety was so great that she left hernative coast of North Africa and followed her son to Milan and Rome. She found him halfway to conversion, in a state of general doubt. Augustine recalls: “My mother told me - with the greatest calmness, with the kind of serenity that comes from complete confidence - that she believed that before she left this world, she would see me a Catholic. She said so much to me. And to You, who are the source of mercy, she prayed even more fervently, weeping, and begged you to help me as soon as possible and to illuminate my darkness with Your light”.
Monica lived to see her prayers fulfilled. She broke up with a woman with whom Augustine was living in an illegal relationship and even cared for a suitable candidate for his wife. She did not think that her son would become a priest after his conversion. She died shortly after Augustine was baptized. In Ostia, where she was waiting for the ship to return to Africa, she experienced a moment of happiness and fulfillment. This is one of the most beautiful "Confessions" pages. Mother and son, leaning against the window, looking at the home garden, talk for a long time with each other, as it turned out to be for the last time. They talk about the road traveled and happiness which is God. "In our longing, we opened our hearts to the heavenly stream flowing from your spring, the spring of life that is with you ...".
Like her
Saint Francis de Sales said to the women: - Ladies, if you want to be truly Christian mothers, fix your eyes on Saint Monica. Read her life and you will find many things in it that will comfort you.
Patroness of distressed mothers, encouragement to perseverance in prayers for loved ones, persistently storming heaven like the widow in the Gospel parable. If there were more such women, there would probably be more holy men - their sons and husbands.
Great is the power of a mother's love.
Until Tomorrow
fr. george