The Child of So Many Tears

The Psalm we pray today on St. Monica's feast whispers the thing she must have clung to for decades: where can I flee from your presence? If I sink to the nether world, you are present there. St. Monica knew the nether world. She watched her son Augustine sink into it, the Manichees, the concubines, the restless wandering, and she followed him, not to rescue him, because she couldn't, but because she refused to pray from a distance. She followed him from North Africa to Rome to Milan. When a bishop finally told her, gently, to leave Augustine alone and trust her tears to God, she took that as a promise. She held it for years.

The Gospel today offers the contrast, a warning against the performance of righteousness, the whitewashed tomb that looks right from the outside. St. Monica was the opposite of that. What she carried, hope for a son who didn't want to be hoped for, was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see. No fruit, not yet, not for a long time. I think about that when I pray for my own daughter, as I do every day. There is something in a mother's heart that longs, almost desperately, for her child to know the God she loves, to feel held by him, claimed by him, set on fire by him. And there is something equally true that no amount of wanting can make it happen. Faith cannot be transferred. It can only be witnessed, prayed over, and released. St. Monica teaches us that the release is not defeat. It is its own form of trust. Her holiness lived entirely in the interior: in the prayers that went on even when nothing changed, in the tears that Scripture tells us moved a bishop to say the child of so many tears cannot be lost. St. Monica's witness is not a lesson in persistence for its own sake. It is a lesson in what it looks like to believe, really believe, that the darkness is not dark to God. She knew something was happening even when she couldn't see it. Most of the most important things work that way.