Daily Reflections ...

Today is the Feast of St Monica. For the gospel reading, we are given a choice between Matthew 25:1-13 and Luke 7:11-17. I have chosen to reflect upon the latter reading, for reasons that will become apparent.

It tells of Jesus’ encounter with a mother whose only son had recently died. When Jesus sees her – a woman who had also lost her husband – he feels compassion for her and restores her son to life. While this event anticipates the experience of Jesus’ own mother in some respects – she was also a widow, who would also lose her only son, and yet would experience her son rising from the dead – the decision to include this Lukan text as an optional reading seems to draw inspiration from a rather famous event recalled by St. Augustine in his Confessions.

Augustine’s mother, St Monica, was a devout Christian. And for years she experienced great sorrow and fear with respect to her son’s soul, for he was a devotee of Manichaeism. Augustine writes that during this time, his mother encountered a learned bishop who had once been a Manichean. She entreated him to speak with her son, so as to refute his errors and direct him on the right path. The bishop, however, refused her request. He reasoned that Augustine was still unteachable, being as he was “inflated with the novelty of that heresy.” Rather, the bishop advised her to be patient, to leave him alone but to pray for him. Augustine continues:

“[Yet] she would not be satisfied, but repeated more earnestly her entreaties, shedding copious tears, … [H]e, a little vexed at her importunity, exclaimed, ‘Go your way, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.’” (Confessions, III.12)

Many of us have sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, who have given up their practise of the faith. Let us not lose heart, but take solace from the bishop’s advice: be patient and pray. And whether one is dead in body (as the widow’s son was) or dead in soul (as St Augustine was), never stop praying. God can receive our prayers even yet unspoken, and, not being bound by time, can apply those graces where he wills.

 by Mark Makowiecki