The Son of These Tears

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. PSALM 126:5

No account of Augustine can be told without his mother, and he would not have wanted it told any other way. Almost everything we know of Monica comes from the Confessions, written some ten years after her death, and it is a portrait drawn by a son who loved her and who knew he owed her, under God, his soul. It is not a flattering portrait. He shows her faults as well as her faith. But it is the fullest picture of a praying parent the ancient church has left us, and it has comforted mothers and fathers for sixteen centuries.

A long obedience in prayer

Monica prayed for her son for something like seventeen years, counting from the time he first strayed to the day he was baptised. For nine of those years he was a Manichee, arguing cleverly against the faith she had taught him. He lived with a woman outside marriage. He mocked what she held dear. Nothing she said moved him. Augustine, looking back, speaks of her tears as though he could see them still. She wept for him, he says, more than mothers weep for the bodily death of their children, and God heard her, and did not despise her tears when they “watered the ground under her eyes in every place where she prayed.”

And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint. LUKE 18:1

There is no way to make those years sound easy. They were not a story yet. They were a mother going to God day after day about a son who was getting worse, with nothing to hold on to but a dream and a tired bishop’s word. That is what persevering prayer usually looks like. It does not feel like faith. It feels like going back to the same place with the same request and seeing no change. Monica’s example is not that she felt confident. It is that she did not stop.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? PSALM 56:8

The bishop and the promise

Augustine tells how, in the midst of those years, she went to a certain bishop, himself once a Manichee, and begged him to talk to her son and argue him out of his errors. The bishop wisely refused. The young man was not yet teachable, he said; he was too pleased with the novelty of his heresy. Let him alone, and pray. When she pressed him further with tears, the bishop, a little annoyed, sent her away with the words she kept for the rest of her life: “Go thy ways and God bless thee, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.”

There is a lesson in the bishop’s refusal as well as in his promise. Monica wanted someone to fix her son with an argument. The bishop knew that arguments would not reach him yet. There are seasons when the most loving thing a parent can do is stop talking and keep praying. That is agony for a parent. It is sometimes the only way.

When God says no

The most searching passage about Monica comes in Book V. When Augustine decided to leave Africa for Rome, she was determined to go with him, or to stop him. He lied to her. He told her he was only seeing off a friend, and while she spent the night praying in a chapel by the harbour — praying, Augustine says, that God would not let him sail — he sailed. She woke to find him gone.

Her prayer that night was refused. And yet Augustine, writing years later, saw in the refusal the deepest answer. “Thou, in the depth of Thy counsels and hearing the main point of her desire,” he prays, “regardest not what she then asked, that Thou mightest make me what she ever asked.” If Augustine had stayed in Carthage, he would never have gone to Milan, never have heard Ambrose, never have sat in the garden. Monica asked for the wrong thing in order to get the right one, and God, in His mercy, gave her the right one.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. ISAIAH 55:8

Every praying parent needs this passage. We pray for particular outcomes — that a child would not move away, not take that job, not marry that person — and God sometimes refuses. We are tempted to think He has stopped listening. Monica’s story says He may be answering the deeper prayer, the one we have been praying all along, in a way we could never have chosen.

Not a plaster saint

Augustine does not hide his mother’s weaknesses. As a young woman, he tells us, she had begun to drink more wine than was good for her, until a servant’s taunt shamed her out of it. She was anxious for her son’s worldly success as well as his soul, and she arranged the respectable marriage that led to the painful dismissal of the woman Augustine had lived with for fifteen years. Her love could be possessive; it followed him across the sea. None of this is said to diminish her. It is said because it is true, and because it means that her faith was the faith of an ordinary sinner, not of a heroine beyond our reach.

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. JAMES 5:16

She was also, it should be said, a patient wife. Married young to Patricius, a man of fierce temper and unfaithful habits, she bore with him without quarrelling, and over many years won him to Christ, so that he was baptised before he died. She did in her marriage what she later did for her son: she outlasted unbelief with love.

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives. 1 PETER 3:1

The window at Ostia

The prayers were answered. Monica saw her son baptised, and in the last days of her life they stood together at a window at Ostia, looking into a garden. “We were discoursing then together, alone, very sweetly,” Augustine says, about what the life of the saints would be, and their minds rose together beyond all created things to touch, for a moment, the Wisdom of God. When they came down again she told him that she had nothing left to live for; the one thing she had wanted, to see him a Christian before she died, God had given her in abundance.

Within days she fell ill. As she was dying she told her sons not to trouble about where she was buried: “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.” Protestant readers will note that she asked for prayer after death, a practice Scripture does not teach and the Reformers rejected. It is fair to say so plainly, and fair also to see what the request shows: a woman who no longer cared where her body lay, because her hope was entirely in Christ’s sacrifice. She died in her fifty-sixth year, and her son wept for her in secret.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice. 2 TIMOTHY 1:5

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down the name of one person you have stopped praying for because nothing seemed to change. Begin again today.

2. If you are a parent anxious about a child, ask whether this is a season to keep talking or to keep praying. Ask God for wisdom to tell the difference.

3. Think of a prayer God refused. Ask Him to show you what deeper prayer He may have been answering.

4. Thank God by name for the people who prayed for you before you prayed for yourself.

5. Look for someone in your church who has been praying for years with no visible answer, and encourage them this week.

A PRAYER

Father, You heard Monica’s tears and You did not despise them, though for years it seemed You were silent.

I bring You those I love who are far from You. I do not know how to reach them, but You do.

Where You refuse what I ask, give me grace to trust that You are answering what I most deeply desire.

Keep me from fainting in prayer. Let me sow in tears, and let me live to reap in joy. Amen.