+ As we celebrate the Feast today of two saints of the fourth century: a mother, St. Monica of Tagaste, North Africa (modern Algeria); and her son, St. Augustine, also born in Tagaste – we reflect upon the powerful impact these two had and continue to have in the history of the Catholic Church.
In his youth Augustine led a wild life. There is no other way to describe it. He lived with a Carthaginian woman from the age of 15 through 30 and was familiar with all of the distasteful and addictive habits of youth. He fathered a son whom he named Adeotadus, which means the gift of God. He was taught rhetoric at Carthage and Milan, Italy. After investigating and experimenting with several philosophies, be became a Manichean for several years; it taught of a great struggle between good and evil, saying basically that the material world was evil, and the world of the intellect and mind was good. This, of course, is not true: both are created good. This philosophy featured a lax moral code, and so a summation of his thinking at this time comes from his Confessions: "God, give me chastity and continence – but not just now."
Augustine finally broke with the Manicheans and was converted by the prayers of his mother, St. Monica; and the help of St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, who baptized him. On the death of his mother he returned to Africa, sold his property, gave the proceeds to the poor and founded a monastery. Thus he became a monk, a priest, a preacher, and later the Bishop of Hippo in 369. He founded religious communities, fought the heresies of the day including: Manichaeism, Donatism, and Palagianism. He oversaw his diocese during the fall of the Roman Empire to the Vandals. Because of the insight and clarity and obvious divine origins of his writings he was declared Doctor of the Church – one of the four originating Western Doctors (who included also Ambrose, Jerome and Gregory). His later thinking can be summed up in a line from his writings: "Our hearts were made for You, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in you." This is one of the most profound sentences in all of theology! St. Augustine died in the year 430 at Hippo.
St. Monica, the beloved mother of Augustine, who prayed thirty years for his conversion, was raised in a Christian family but given in marriage to a bad-tempered, adulterous pagan named Patricius. In addition to praying so long for Augustine, she prayed too for the conversion of her husband, who did convert on his deathbed. She died in 387. A pillar of power is the example that St. Monica gives to anyone who is intensely praying for the conversion to God of anyone for any reason! God hears each and every prayer – and sometimes it becomes a "second vocation" in life to pray for those who are "difficult cases." Monica's ceaseless prayers yielded one saint: one of the greatest in all of Church history; and no doubt a very grateful citizen of heaven, who almost missed the boat except that his good wife just would not give up on him!
Our first reading today reminds us that if we love one another, for the love of God, for his sake, then he will live in us, and we will be able to experience the reality of God as he is in himself! This is the experience that drew St. Augustine to conversion: the reality that God is so beautiful, and wonderful and marvelous and true – that he could not imagine life without a very close relationship and friendship with him. The gospel passage relates the tender story of Jesus giving back to a grieving mother a son whom he raised from the dead for her. Jesus raised St. Augustine from a kind of spiritual death – and because his mother prayed and begged for his life for a very long time – he was given back to her – so that he could do God's amazing will in his life and she could die in peace – having fulfilled his will for her.
With all my heart I seek you, Lord, let me never stray (again) from your paths!
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