This weekend, the Church remembers St. Augustine of Hippo and his mother, Monica (on August 28 and 27, respectively). The two saints are as close in the Christian calendar as they were in life. In fact, we know about Monica primarily through Augustine’s spiritual “autobiography,” the Confessions, where he paints a moving portrait of a mother who never gave up on her son’s salvation.
In chapter 3, Augustine reports that his mother wept for his soul before his conversion to Christianity. God comforted Monica in a vision. Augustine writes:
How could this vision come to her unless ‘your ears were close to her heart?’ You are good and all-powerful, caring for each one of us as though the only one in your care, and yet for all as for each individual.*
In this statement, Augustine paints a vivid picture of God’s overwhelming love. God rests his ear on Monica’s chest and listens to her heartbeat, her tears, her pain. In her moment of need, everything and everyone else fades from God’s view, and she becomes his only care and concern. Augustine notes that God lavishes this kind of care on each person who calls him Father.
Some people paraphrase Augustine’s statement by saying that God loves each of us like an only child. In Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead, the character of Pastor John Ames proclaims as much: “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true” (2004, pp. 245-46). I confess that I love this paraphrase. I love the idea of wallowing in God’s attention the way an only child would her father’s (I grew up as the oldest of three children, so I know what it’s like to compete for limited parental resources—especially when your siblings are younger and cuter than you are).
Later in the Confessions, Augustine describes the death of his beloved mother. He asks his readers to pray for Monica and for her husband. In this passage, Augustine refers to his readers as “my fellow citizens in that eternal Jerusalem, which Your pilgrim people sighs after from their Exodus, even unto their return.”**
Here Augustine introduces a theme that has become dear to my heart. He speaks of Christians as pilgrims. Like the Israelites during the Exodus, we are on the move. We’re taking a long journey—all the way to Jerusalem, where God has prepared a home for us. Each day, we complete part of our pilgrimage. The road is difficult, but we keep going because we long for Jerusalem. We sigh for it. We are a pilgrim people.
This passage is especially poignant because Monica has just completed her own journey home. She has reached the end of her pilgrimage. I like thinking that, centuries later, we’re on the same road that she took—she’s just farther along.
Both of these remarkable passages in the Confessions were inspired by Augustine’s love for his mother. His thoughts about Monica remind us of two important facets of our Christian identity:
—each of us is God’s only child
—each of us is a pilgrim on the road to Jerusalem.
Isn’t it amazing to realize that at the end of our pilgrimage, we will join Monica and Augustine in the eternal home God has prepared for us!
*Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 2009), 3.11.19, p. 50.
**The Confessions of Saint Augustine: Modern English Version (Revell, 2008), 9.13.37, p. 150.