St. Monica: Model of Christian Mothers (with Supplemental Reading: Confession:Its Fruitful Practice) [Illustrated] by F. A. Forbes

Author:F. A. Forbes [Forbes, F. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781618904553
Publisher: TAN Books
Published: 2014-12-22T06:00:00+00:00

Ostia: “The joy of that moment was like a foretaste of eternity.”

“You will bury your mother here,” she said. Augustine could not trust himself to speak; but Navigius, who knew how great had been her desire to be buried at Tagaste beside her husband, protested. “Oh, why are we not at home,” he cried, “where you would wish to be!” Monica looked at him reproachfully. “Do you hear what he says?” she asked Augustine. “Bury my body anywhere,” she said; “it does not matter. Do not let that disturb you. This only I ask—that you remember me at the altar of God wherever you may be.”

To another person, who asked her if it would not be a sorrow to her to be buried in a land so far from home, Monica answered, “One is never far from God.”

It was not only her sons who grieved, but the faithful friends who were with them, for was she not their mother too? Had she not taken as much care of them as if they had been her children?

Augustine scarcely left her side, and she was glad to have him with her. As she thanked him one day for some little thing he had done for her, his lip quivered. She thought he was thinking of all the suffering he had caused her, and smiled at him with tender eyes. “You have always been a good son to me,” she said. “Never have I heard a harsh or reproachful word from your lips.”

“My life was torn in two,” says Augustine. “That life which was made up of mine and hers.”

They were all with her when she passed peacefully away a few days later. They choked back their tears. “It did not seem meet,” says Augustine, “to celebrate that death with groans and lamentations. Such things were fit for a less blessed deathbed, but not for hers.”

Then, as they knelt gazing at the beloved face that seemed to be smiling at some unseen mystery, Evodius had a happy inspiration. Taking up the Psalter, he opened it at the 110th Psalm.

“I will praise Thee, O Lord, with my whole heart,” he sang softly, “in the council of the just, and in the congregation.”

“Great are the works of the Lord,” sang the others with trembling voices, “sought out according to all His wills.” Friends and religious women who had gathered near the house to pray entered and joined in the chant. It was the voice of rejoicing rather than the cry of grief that followed that pure soul on its way to Heaven. Augustine alone was silent, for his heart was breaking.

We are but human, after all, and the sense of their loss fell upon them all later. That night Augustine lay thinking of his mother’s life and the unselfish love of which it had been so full. “Thy handmaid, so pious toward Thee, so careful and tender toward us. And I let go my tears,” he tells us, “and let them flow as much as they would.

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