“You stretched out your hand from on high and pulled my soul out of these murky depths because my mother, who was faithful to you, was weeping for me more bitterly than ever mothers wept for the bodily death of their children.”
—Saint Augustine of Hippo
Really? Out of all the quotes that could have been chosen for the feast days of St. Augustine and St. Monica, this is the one that repeatedly showed up on Facebook. Gag.
Let me preface with saying that we have at least three copies of Augustine’s “Confessions” in the house right now, my favorite translation was done by Frank Sheed. My copy looks like it collided with a yellow highlighter and a pencil. Justin’s copies came back with his belongings, and I am pretty sure Ryan has a copy. I like Augustine and I have spent some time with St. Monica.
Let me tell you that a mother weeps pretty bitterly for her dead child or children. Just because you don’t see it, does not mean that they do not. There is agony that is too private to display, some pain that only can be exposed in silence. Do I weep less because I used to believe that Justin’s soul was safely in God’s hands? No. The pain of child loss can transcend a belief system. Do I weep more for my surviving child and family? No. I weep for the darkness and hardships that shadow every life. But the tears for the child who died are of a different nature, those tears spring from a different source.
And before you say that Monica feared eternal damnation for Augustine because he was quite the rake, I get it. Do not fear what happens to the body, but rather the soul. And yes, I get that Augustine was employing a literary tool to communicate the depth of his mother’s faithfulness and trust, he was comparing the eternal capture of a damned soul to the eternal life of a soul turned to its maker. Get that. But this is what has churned in my mind since earlier this week, Augustine was a man, not a mother. Yes, he had a child, a child born to him by his mistress. A child who was loved by his grandmother. A child he rebuked for his tears when his grandmother died. The heart of a mother did not beat in Augustine. I am not denigrating the grief that strikes a father’s heart. As a woman, I can only stand at the threshold of the grief that encompasses the father of my sons, I stand in respectful silence and acknowledge that I can never say “I know your pain.” I honor his solitary grief by having the courage to enter my own solitary grief, to give myself over to those purging fires.
As a mother who still weeps bitterly for her son, I pondered the wisdom and thought process of why someone would chose this text to express the mother and son relationship of Augustine and Monica. Granted, it has been several years since I read anything of Augustine, but I always thought that I had a bond with St. Monica. Now, she and I are oceans apart. I reread Book Nine of “Confessions”, the death of Monica. I was struck anew at how much Augustine struggled with what he interpreted as his weakness, his tears, how he stemmed their tide, crushed them down inside his heart. He thought them childish and unmanly, he felt fresh grief at his grief. He grieved his human condition that tasked him with such sorrow. Paragraph 32 in Section 12 of Book Nine tells of his struggle after his mother’s burial, his plaintive cry to God to heal him of his pain, but still he would not weep. And then we read in Paragraph 33…“And I found solace in weeping in Your sight both about her and for her, about myself and for myself. I no longer tried to check my tears, but let them flow as they would, making them a pillow for my heart: and it rested upon them, for it was Your ears that heard my weeping, and not the ears of a man, who would have misunderstood my tears and despised them.” What a beautiful, healing visage of a soul finding peace in the gift of tears, what humility is shown in embracing his own humanity and giving himself over to his grief, letting it flow through him.
Would that their last days been quoted, the conversations that took place as they both rested at Ostia on the Tiber, before undertaking the long sea voyage back to Africa. The gentle ease of companionship those last days as they sat overlooking a garden and spoke of heaven and earth, God and life. His mother died in Ostia, but they shared such a gift of time, unhurried days of gentle rest.
Monica died before Augustine, we don’t know if she would have shed more tears or not had he died before she, very little is known of Monica except for what Augustine shares with us in “Confessions”. Tradition holds that she wept many tears for Augustine, but more bitterly, or more deeply than for a dead son or daughter? We don’t know. It is very easy to isolate one quote from thousands and build on that one quote an entire philosophy that may or may not be true, or only shards of truth. One must be so careful as to what to select to represent a saint, for that quote pitted me against a woman who I thought was my friend. Now I am at odds with her, would she hold my grief contemptible, wasted on an already dead child? And Augustine, is it not apparent that he is ardently declaring by hyperbole his own wretchedness that drew such bitter, copious tears from his mother, assuaging his distress at her tears? So why isolate that quote? Why? I realize that this was not done with malice, but without thought to all those grieving mothers who buried their sons first. That quote tells me very little of the rich interior life Augustine and Monica shared, or of their last days together, it does not spur me to seek out and read more about them.
I would like to think that if Monica and Augustine were to see what singular quote had been selected, they would have caught each others eyes and said “Really?”
