Lives of the saints
St. Augustine and St. Monica: the mother who prayed him home
For years Monica prayed and wept for her brilliant, restless son. This is the story of St. Augustine of Hippo and his mother, St. Monica, and the words that have spoken to restless hearts for sixteen centuries. For every mother, father, and grandparent still praying for someone far from God.
“Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”St. Augustine, Confessions I.1
A restless son
Augustine was born in 354 AD in Thagaste, a small town in what is now Algeria. His father, Patricius, was a pagan with a hot temper, who came to faith only near the end of his life. His mother, Monica, was a Christian, and she prayed. Augustine was brilliant, and he knew it. As a young man he went to study in Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa. “To Carthage I came,” he later wrote, “where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves.” He took a companion, and they had a son, Adeodatus, “given by God.” For nine years he followed the Manichees, a sect that promised him truth by reason alone.
The son of these tears
Monica never stopped praying for him. She wept for her son, he wrote, “more than mothers weep the bodily deaths of their children.” She begged a bishop to speak with him, and he sent her home with words she held onto for years: “It is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” When Augustine sailed for Rome, he slipped away by night while she prayed in a chapel near the ship. She followed him anyway, across the sea, all the way to Milan.
Take up and read
In Milan, Augustine went to hear the bishop, Ambrose, only to judge his eloquence. He came for the eloquence, and he stayed for the meaning. But knowing was not the same as surrender; as a youth he had once prayed, “Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.” In the summer of 386 AD, in a garden in Milan, he threw himself down under a fig tree and wept. Then he heard a child’s voice from a nearby house, singing over and over: “Take up and read; take up and read.” He opened the letters of St. Paul and read the first words his eyes fell on: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:13–14). “No further would I read; nor needed I.”
At Easter in 387 AD, Ambrose baptized Augustine in Milan, with his friend Alypius and his son, Adeodatus.
A window at Ostia
That year mother and son set out for home. At Ostia, the port of Rome, they stood together at a window looking into a garden and talked quietly about the eternal life of the saints. A few days later Monica fell ill with a fever. She asked only one thing: “Lay this body any where. This only I request, that you would remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you be.” She died there, in the fifty-sixth year of her life. Her prayers had been answered.
Bishop of Hippo
Back in Africa, the people of Hippo took hold of Augustine and asked that he be made a priest, and within a few years he was their bishop. He preached, settled quarrels, cared for the poor, and wrote the Confessions, The City of God, and hundreds of sermons and letters. “Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new!” He died on August 28, 430 AD, while the Vandals besieged Hippo, with the penitential psalms hung on the wall by his bed.
Three simple practices
- Keep praying. Name before God the person you are praying for, today and every day. No tears are wasted.
- Take up and read. Read one chapter of Scripture slowly this week, and stop where a word speaks to you.
- Rest your restless heart. Sit in silence for five minutes and pray Augustine’s words: our heart is restless, until it rests in you.
Watch the story
The Mother Who Prayed Him Home tells the whole story with sacred art. Watch it on YouTube, with Spanish and French subtitles.
A closing prayer
O God, the Light of the minds that know thee, the Life of the souls that love thee, and the Strength of the thoughts that seek thee: help us so to know thee that we may truly love thee, so to love thee that we may fully serve thee, whose service is perfect freedom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Keep praying with us
New prayers, rosaries, and teachings with sacred art on YouTube, and the Daily Office read aloud in the free MyOratory™ app.
