At the Window in Ostia

“But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” — 1 Corinthians 2:9 (KJV)

Augustine didn't storm out of his job. He waited a few weeks until the grape-harvest holidays and then quietly resigned. Chest pains had made teaching hard anyway, which gave him an honest excuse. He, Monica, Alypius, his son and some friends went to stay at a borrowed country house. There he read the Psalms and wept over them.

The next spring, back in Milan, he was baptised by Ambrose, together with Alypius and his son Adeodatus, who was nearly fifteen. Augustine was amazed by the boy's mind. “Excellently hadst Thou made him,” he writes, and he says the ideas given to Adeodatus in a dialogue they wrote together were really the boy's own. But he also tells us, simply, “Soon didst Thou take his life from the earth.” Adeodatus died young, a few years later. At the services in Milan Augustine wept again: “How did I weep, in Thy Hymns and Canticles”.

They set off home for Africa and stopped at Ostia, the port of Rome, to wait for a ship. Here Augustine pauses to tell us about his mother. As a girl she had slowly slipped into a secret drinking habit, a sip at a time, until a servant girl in a quarrel called her a “wine-bibber” and she stopped for good. She married a hot-tempered husband who was unfaithful to her, yet she won him to faith before he died. She was a peacemaker who never repeated angry words from one person to another.

One day at Ostia, mother and son stood alone at a window looking out over a garden, talking about what heaven will be like. As they talked, their minds rose past everything in the world, past sun and stars, past their own thoughts, toward God himself, until for a moment “we slightly touched on her with the whole effort of our heart,” the eternal Wisdom of God. Then they came back down to ordinary words. Monica said:

“Son, for mine own part I have no further delight in any thing in this life. What I do here any longer, and to what I am here, I know not, now that my hopes in this world are accomplished. One thing there was for which I desired to linger for a while in this life, that I might see thee a Catholic Christian before I died. My God hath done this for me more abundantly, that I should now see thee withal, despising earthly happiness, become His servant: what do I here?”

About five days later she fell ill with a fever. She had always wanted to be buried beside her husband in Africa, but now she turned to her sons. “Lay,” she said, “this body any where; let not the care for that any way disquiet you: this only I request, that you would remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be.” When friends asked if she was afraid of dying so far from home, she said, “Nothing is far to God.” On the ninth day she died. She was fifty-five, in her fifty-sixth year; Augustine was thirty-two.

When she died, Adeodatus cried out loud. The adults hushed him, and Augustine forced back his own tears through the funeral, thinking a believer shouldn't weep. Inside he was breaking. He went to the baths, hoping it would ease the sadness, and was “the same as before I bathed.” He slept, and when he woke he finally let himself cry, “for her and for myself.” He asks his readers: if anyone thinks it was a sin that “I wept my mother for a small portion of an hour”, the mother “who had for many years wept for me that I might live in Thine eyes”, let him not mock, but pray.

Faith doesn't switch off grief. Augustine thought it should, and he was wrong, and he admits it. You can believe someone is with God and still sob that they aren't with you.

One thing to do this week: tell someone who loves you what they mean to you, this week, in words, not just a heart emoji. Don't wait for a window in Ostia.