St. Monica

Today is the day we celebrate the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo. I don't want to say too much about her here - you can read far better accounts than I could give at Saint of the Day and the Catholic Encyclopedia.

What I do want to remember is her patience in prayer. Her son was a most unpromising subject for prayer, having accepted the Manichean heresy and living a seriously immoral life. More than that, she had an evil-tempered husband and a cantankerous mother-in-law. But she knew how to pray...

For many years she prayed, so much so that a bishop, whose name history doesn't record, said to her, "The child of those tears shall never perish." Before her death in 387AD, in her late 60s, Monica had seen all three accept Christ their Saviour. In Augustine's case, it took 32 years. She did not know it at the time, but her death appears to have prompted Augustine to write his Confessions, the most famous of all his works, and one of the great documents of the early Church.

Truly, I know I've never even scratched the surface of Luke 18's "pray always and not to lose heart." The life of St. Monica gives us just a hint of how it could be if we were to take those words seriously...