St. Monica and the Power of Persistent Prayer by Mike Aquilina

Author:Mike Aquilina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

“Sorry” Seems to

Be the Hardest

Word

Thanks to the genius of her son, St. Monica’s voice rings vividly more than a thousand years after her death. Augustine set down their conversations in loving detail, and so we find ourselves eavesdropping on discussions and debates. We hear the son putting questions to the mother, and the mother answering in ways that show her to be shrewd, passionate, intelligent, devout, and deliberate. We hear a mother admonishing her son.

What we don’t find anywhere — and this should be surprising — is an apology. Augustine does wrong by his mother for seventeen years. He disobeys her. He lies to her. He abandons her. He embarrasses her. He says hurtful things to her. Like the Prodigal Son in the Gospel, he spends down the inheritance of faith he had received from his mother.

Then he returns to the Catholic faith and amends his life. It is from that transitional period that he preserved the most conversations with his mother. We can read those conversations from end to end, and we’ll find Augustine and Monica talking about everything, even the weather, but we’ll never find him saying, “I’m sorry, Mom.”

It’s quite possible, of course, that he did apologize, and considered the fact so obvious that it didn’t require a paragraph in his memoir.

But it’s just as possible that he didn’t apologize — that he found it too difficult or too awkward — or that his mother made it clear that it was unnecessary, that all was forgiven.

He wrote his Confessions when he was still a relatively new Christian, and the book itself represents his early effort to work things out. He makes it clear that he recognized the mistakes of his past and he repented of them before God. But sometimes saying “sorry” to God comes more easily than saying it to a family member.

We can see that Monica must have forgiven her son many times over. But we have no clear evidence that he ever asked for her forgiveness.

We, too, must be prepared to forgive often, because we live in a communion of clumsy saints. We often have some modicum of good intentions, but we’re held back by pride. Back in the 1970s (when we were kids), one of the top-rated television series was Happy Days. The main character on the show was Fonzie, a superconfident outlier who wore a leather jacket and took meticulous care with his slicked-back hair. He couldn’t pass a mirror without admiring himself. In one episode, “The Fonz” made a mistake for which he had to apologize — and all of his organs of speech rebelled against the action. He choked on the phrases “I was wrong” and “I’m sorry.” His lips and his tongue fell paralyzed: “I was wrrrrrrrr.…”

We viewers laughed at Fonzie’s vanity, but none of us kids forgot the scene. Even if we didn’t have Fonzie’s self-confidence or good looks (and your authors certainly didn’t), we still had trouble saying those phrases to our family members.

Augustine had earned his self-confidence even more than Fonzie did, yet he may have encountered the same paralysis.

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