Augustine's Spiritual Awakening | When Christianity Finally Made Sense

Episode 42

How did St. Augustine finally become Catholic after years of rejecting Christianity?

The conversion of St. Augustine is one of the most famous stories in Catholic history, but it did not happen in a single dramatic moment. Augustine had spent years searching for answers about God, evil, truth, desire and the restless human heart. Meanwhile, his mother, St. Monica, had spent those same years praying that her son would eventually find his way to Christ.

In Part 2 of this Rebel Saints deep dive into St. Monica and St. Augustine, Augustine’s search continues in Italy, where his path brings him into contact with St. Ambrose of Milan and forces him to reconsider many of the Christian ideas he had once dismissed.

This is the part of the story where theology becomes intensely personal. Augustine can no longer treat Christianity as simply another intellectual problem to solve. His questions about truth collide with his habits, desires, ambition and growing awareness that believing something is true and surrendering your life to it are two very different things.

And through it all stands Monica, still praying for the son she has followed across the Mediterranean and still waiting for the answer to prayers she began years earlier.

So how did one of Christianity’s most famous skeptics become one of the Catholic Church’s greatest saints? And what can St. Augustine’s conversion teach us about grace, free will, prayer and our own restless search for God?

References & Further Reading

Purchase a copy of St Augustine’s Confessions on Amazon

St. Augustine’s Confessions may be read for free online - via Gutenburg

St. Augustine, Confessions, Books V, VIII and IX
Pope Benedict XVI, “Saint Augustine of Hippo” catechesis series
Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience on St. Ambrose of Milan
Pope Benedict XVI, reflections on St. Monica and St. Augustine
Romans 13:13–14

Much of what we know about the conversion of St. Augustine and his relationship with his mother, St. Monica, comes from Augustine’s own Confessions.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey Rebels, welcome back to Rebel Saints Podcast. I am your host, Nicole, and I am so glad you are here. So this is gonna be part two of my deep dive with Saints Monica and Augustine. So if you haven't watched part one, pause this episode and go back to the one just before this.

Because there is a lot of back history that you're gonna want to know and lots of stuff that we can learn and grow from these saints. And so I don't want you to miss that, especially the stuff about Saint Monica. Okay, so when last we left, Augustine had sailed across the sea after deceiving his mom, Monica. To go to Rome.

And there he encounters this guy, his name's Ambrose. Yes, today we know him as Saint Ambrose, but back then He was not yet a saint. But eventually Augustine does encounter him when he reaches Milan. I wonder what Milan was like I used to live in Italy and it was a glorious time in my life and Milan was

one of those really gorgeous gothic cities but it wasn't it wasn't like that in three 84 it was it was still part of the Roman Empire, right?

It wasn't the Milan we know today for fashion and all that gorgeous stuff. But Augustine he makes it to Milan and he actually obtains a very prestigious unsurprisingly right

prestigious position as professor of rhetoric. And every time I hear this word rhetoric, I always think of like my A P

Should I move that now? You're watching this on video.

I got distracted by these flowers I have on my side table. Jeez, gosh, ADHD. Sorry. So whenever I hear this word rhetoric, I like think of the first time I encountered this word, it was like 10th grade, maybe it was honors English, maybe it 11th grade, AP English.

I don't know, but it was Miss Blanchard. She passed away, last year. But I loved this teacher. God rest her soul.

She was amazing. You know, how sometimes people can see you for you and you don't even realize it. So fifteen, sixteen-year-old Nicole, we would write our essays and we would write them on paper. And she was like, I'm I'm impressed by what a creative speller you are.

In this essay, you've spelt this one word like three different ways or whatever. And she's like, I'm just so tickled by that. And I was like, Okay. And she's like, one's ability to spell has no indication on their intelligence.

And so she was like, she was calling this thing, out hey, you need to be more careful, pay more attention, right, to what you're doing. But it doesn't

mean that you're not a good writer doesn't mean that you're not intelligent. It just means you need like you get so caught up in whatever the story, whatever you're trying to say, that you're not taking the time to pay attention. Part of my job with the Catholic standard, the paper I work for the Archdiocese of Washington is whenever we go to press, I kind of line edit and copy edit.

And now, which I'm like, I wish I could tell her, like

you'd be so proud of me because I'm I'm finding all the little mistakes, right? But, she saw my need to pay attention And she did it with so much love and so much care that she made me better. And so Augustine gets to Milan and he gets this job as a professor of rhetoric. At the time Milan was one of the super important political cities in

what is the Western Roman Empire.

Augustine was moving. He was like moving and shaking in those very influential circles, right? So all the things that he had desired and wanted for himself, he was achieving. And then he meets this guy named Ambrose.

And Ambrose was the Bishop of Milan. And already an important figure publicly, right? Like he was not working in the mailroom, let's say, at the time. And Ambrose was trained in law and government before he had unexpectedly become bishop.

So like Augustine, he was an intellect and he had the gift for rhetoric. As a reminder, rhetoric is the art of persuasive language or writing or speaking. Augustine, learning these things about Ambrose, went to hear Ambrose speak because he wanted to evaluate his rhetoric and how good he was. He wanted to size him up, he wasn't going to hear what he had to say.

He was going to judge him. And I thought, like, Yeah, of course you did. I can see the ego in it all, right? Like it I mean, it was it was it's such an Augustine thing to do when you are living the life that Augustine was living.

You can see people who do this, they wanna go to compare to see if, I can do this better than you. Not

what can I learn from you? You have similar talents, similar gifts. You've been doing this longer than me.

What can I learn from you? No, I'm gonna see if I can do it better than you. So, he was sitting there and he was assessing sentence structure, and God he just kind of came through the side door. And as Augustine was sitting there listening, he discovered that Ambrose interpreted scripture in a way

with a sophistication he had never encountered.

And what it did was it caused Augustine to

look at these passages that he had formally addressed as like crude or not intellectual enough, like, you're so sweet, like right. And he was like, Wow, like you can actually look into these things and interpret them. With deeper meaning. Like I can use the gifts of my brain and my intellect to dive deeper into what is being taught here.

And this is the foundation of Catholicism, And our tradition and how these church fathers and these interpretations and how the Holy Spirit reveals these things to us, right? And so

in this moment Augustine was learning that for himself firsthand. Around the same time, Augustine encountered this philosophical tradition called Neoplatonism. And it is especially associated with thinkers like Plotinus.

And basically, what this tradition helped him do was

give him tools that helped him conceive of God in a genuinely spiritual way. And it allowed him to think about the nature of good and evil in a different perspective. And what happened was is that his old understanding that he got from the Manichean

movement it had imagined good and evil kind of like as almost s competing substances in the cosmos, And Augustine gradually came to understand evil as the corruption of goodness, a privation that depends upon something good in order to damage it. Kind of like rust.

You can't have rust if you don't have metal, right? One depends on the other. It just doesn't exist to just exist. Like rotting things, right?

Like things don't rot if there's nothing to decay. So

That insight gave Augustine a way to understand evil without constructing an evil substance eternally competing with God. And once that became clear these intellectual obstacles he had with Christianity began to unravel. Like dominoes just following one after the other.

Eventually, Monica being Monica, brought her butt to Milan. I can't say that I wouldn't do that either. And so she went crossed the Mediterranean

And Augustine was probably like, I need some more time. I can't go back home yet.

I got stuff to do here, And honestly, he just needed some space, right? He needed to kind of just go out and do this on his own. Even with all of this perspective, Monica was still learning. She had grown up with North African Christian customs, including bringing food and wine to memorial shrines of martyrs.

Ambrose had actually prohibited that practice in Milan because. He felt that there were abuses surrounding the custom and he was concerned that these customs resembled pagan traditions or customs or celebrations like way too much. And so

This is three hundred and eighty-four one,

And even to this day, Catholics go and we lay flowers, we light candles in front of martyrs, in front of saints, right? We take care of relics of saints, sitting on this table behind me and on the shelf are artificial silk roses.

That when St. Thérèse of Lisieux was here in the Metro DC area, I took and touched to her reliquary, right? And to bring like a piece of her home with me almost. And so Ambrose was like, yeah, you guys are abusing this.

And so we're not gonna do this here. He put a kibosh on that. And I think that's very good to hear. Especially if you're a Christian but you're not a Catholic Christian.

Because it's often said that our faith is basically like we took pagan celebrations and we made them our own, which we didn't do. And this is kind of proof, that it was like, Yeah, actually this resembles paganism too much because you're not doing it the way you should be doing it. And I love, love, love, love that for us. So anyway.

When Monica learned this rule, she adjusted. She was like she didn't fight it, Augustine admired that about her, that she could like pivot, right? And wasn't so rigid. And this is another detail that he reveals about his mother and this woman who had this enormous amount of faith and her faith in God gave her so much like security that she could distinguish devotion from habit.

And she loved this custom, like it brought her it brought her peace and it gave her a sense of like connectedness, kinda like with me and the flowers, right? But she understood that she could love this custom and at the same time discover that the church in Milan were doing things differently and it didn't disrupt her relationship with God or her faith. Like that wasn't what her relationship was, right? And so she continued living her faith It didn't cause her to spiral or like, lose her mind on in like I don't know, the public comment boards or whatever of her day.

I don't know, trying to relate it to social media. And she definitely wasn't saying, Well, this isn't how we do it back home either. Like saying, we do it better than you guys do it. And I think

Monica should also be the patroness of people who su survive liturgical changes.

Sometimes in my head I will say when the priest says and with your spirit and I just wanna say And also with you or

Yeah, so it would be like peace be with you, and now we say, and your spirit, but we used to say and also with you. Anyway, you know what I'm saying, if you've been a Catholic for any amount of time. So as someone who's worked like in churches and in church communities,

When people get new priests and like they're afraid they're gonna change all the things, you know, and it's like, he's gonna ruin it. And I once worked for a military chapel and we got a new priest and he's said, I always wait a year before I make any changes so people can get to know me.

And I thought that was so clever, you know. Because people do get stuck in their ways and then you a new young priest will come along and mix things up and everyone's all up in arms. But Monica, should be their patron saint to just

Trust the process. So at this point, Augustine is like probably in his thirties, right?

And all of the intellectual objections he had to Christianity were like barely hanging on. They were so weak. Christianity made sense to him in ways it hadn't ever before. But Augustine was an intellectual.

And this intellectual agreement that he had in his mind, what it did was actually cause him to go and kind of have a much more personal crisis because he had built his life around things like his ambition, his sexual habits, his advancement socially, and this pursuit of

Prestige, right? Like he was just trying to fill himself up with all these things. And

when he encountered Christianity and it made sense to him in his mind. It

started making claims on all the things that he loved about his life and all the ways he lived.

And

That is when Augustine became aware of, this divide in human will. And he describes wanting conversion, but also wanting to like pause it, right? Because of what the conversion would cost him and how hard it would be for him. Like and I always tell people being Catholic is not easy.

Like it's hard to really truly live the tenets of the Catholic faith, right? And again, that we don't do it perfectly. I don't know any Catholic that does it perfectly. But it's

The desire to want to do it as well as we can, I think, is what helps make us holy.

Which is why in our culture today, trying to live by these tenets makes us the true rebels. And so this is what Augustine was experiencing, right? Because the world that he lived in was very much like ours today, where it was just

Fill your needs, self-satisfying, YOLO, you only live once, and all of these things. But this new understanding allowed him to see a totally different life for himself.

A life where he could imagine giving himself completely to God. But yet all these old habits and this way of life, they were like pulling him, like gravity, like they had a hold on him. I think that's really amazing, I always say, my god, I love converts. They're my favorite kind of c Catholics, right?

Because they're just they're so good at it being Catholic. And then sometimes you check out fifteen, twenty years later and they're like the rest of us, right? Sometimes not, but you get what I'm saying. But what I think is so amazing about

Is I think a lot of us have this vision of conversion, right?

Like where it's like all of a sudden you see something and the angels sing and you just know, like but for most people, conversion is not like that, It's a slow process, it's a coming to understanding. And this is like, part of social media where I'm seeing these people saying, Yeah, I grew up, hearing all these things about Catholicism and like, y'all, have you paid attention to what they say? Like actually it all makes sense. And then

like they're like, my gosh I went to a Catholic church today and there's more Bible in their mass and did you know they say the same Mass all over the world and like we gotta stop like talking about Catholics like this because we're wrong and then I'm like, you'll be Catholic, like I give you a couple years and you'll be Catholic.

And that's kind of what this is. It's like a slow conversion, it's like a slow burn. Basically, Augustine gives us

this idea that, conversion doesn't happen the moment everyone finally receives all the correct information. It's when we decide

To act on it.

And when we give ourselves the freedom. To act upon what our mind knows and our heart know. Like, you I'm saying, like it's like when we finally give ourselves permission, a lot of times it could be like family, like you grow up in a family, let's say you're all Baptists, and you and you grew up hearing one thing about Catholicism, and then you encounter actual Catholic Christians and people being Catholic the way

that it is actually and you're like, actually, actually, that's like but yet you still have all this like, I can't how can I leave my church? How can I leave my community?

And your mind knows but you have to kind of just give yourself that time and that freedom to actually

Decide. So eventually back to Augustine,

He learns about Saint Anthony of Egypt and like other Christians who had abandoned their worldly ambitions to devote themselves entirely and radically to God. And Augustine says he almost became super mad at himself, right? Because people with less education

We're doing what

He, the brilliant professor, could endlessly analyze and somehow never choose.

And so this crisis of like intellect and heart came to a head in a garden in Milan. He's, walking with his friend, this guy named Alypius, and Augustine begins weeping beneath a fig tree because he's so overwhelmed by this internal conflict. And then he hears the voice of a child. Somewhere nearby repeating a phrase that sounded like take and read Tole.

Augustine returned to the place where he had left a book containing Saint Paul's letters. He opened it and read from Romans thirteen, where Paul urges his readers to abandon sexual immorality, drunkenness, rivalry, and disordered desire, and to clothe themselves in Christ. And Augustine says in that moment the uncertainty it just broke. And

when you look at Augustine's life, that can only make sense by all that have preceded it, right?

So a life of pursuing only things that he desired for himself, only his own pleasure, his own success, his own ambition, what he wanted and what he thought he needed. So he's trying to fill himself up, constantly fill himself up with all these things, women, sex, professional success. And what he needed was God. And to give himself to God.

Hearing that little voice and reading those letters, it didn't just make his past just kind of disappear. Like he didn't all of a sudden, develop like amnesia for, the nine years he spent in this Manichaeism tradition, or all of these con conversations he had about philosophy, or his own like disappointment at his choices. But rather it created a persistent discomfort in his conscience. Because his conscience knew more than what Augustine's mind wanted it to know.

And what I mean by that is grace through all of that minutia, all of that crap and all of that grace was still working all along. And it was in that garden where that tension, like let's imagine you have a rubber band, right? And it's all these like it's filling up and it's holding all this stuff together and then it's expanding, expanding, and then finally it just breaks loose. And once Augustine had told Alypius what happened, there was one other person who needed to hear.

Can you guess who that one is? It was Monica. I wish someone was sitting there with like their iPhones recording it because we don't have a transcript of what that conversation was. But Augustine tells us that she rejoiced.

And I just

as a mom, right? It's kind of like it must almost be like the parable of the prodigal son and like the joy that father had when his lost son had finally came home, right? I can o I can only imagine that's kind of the joy that she felt. And the tears that she must have wept were now so full with joy and gratitude.

And

She was surprised. And so

As parents. When we carry these little babies in our arms and we picture a life for them. We picture, we picture a life for them.

And Monica did that for Augustine, right? She had imagined a very conventional, successful future for him, a respectable marriage, all of these things that made sense. Because he had these amazing gifts, and Roman society offered very clear ways where people like Augustine could find this. But yet all those talents and all those charisms that he did have, they took him in a completely different direction.

One neither of them could see coming. And what happened was Augustine was drawn toward celibacy and a communal Christian life centered around prayer, study, and service. So the priesthood, right? Even though then priests weren't yet required to be celibate.

But increasingly more and more of them were realizing this helped them. Keep their focus, and their relationship with Christ more clear. And Monica, she accepted it. She didn't fight it, right?

And I think like I've had people say, if my son comes to me and says I'm he wants to be a priest, I'm gonna fight it. And I always look at them going like my like I try to hide my eye twitching. Because how could you like how could you discourage that? I would always just encourage, yeah, go explore.

You don't have to

Say yes. Like just if you have this curiosity about it, go explore it. And I think that development too in Monica's character is important because for so long she had prayed for the conversion of her son, but also for him to come to live the life she had wanted for him and she had planned for him. When you love somebody like that.

You have to revise the future we write for them because it's it's not their future. It's it's we do it in our own heads, right? And parents we do this with the best of intentions. And it's like even just like I was having these conversations with my boys today.

I was like, listen, I'm gonna tell you something, but this has this is what I'm seeing. I'm not saying that this is like wrong or whatever. I'm just saying this is what I'm seeing. Is it working for you?

That's kind of like what Monica was doing, but she's like, You need to go do this, right? Augustine developed a vocation

Monica had prayed, prayed, prayed, prayed constantly for Augustine to belong completely to Christ. And when that prayer began to take shape and when it she realized actually God was not answering her prayers. He was just doing this in a way she hadn't envisioned, she received that response, right?

And that is a very mature kind of love. Because it leaves space for the other person to be who they are and not someone we invented. So Augustine he withdrew from his teaching career and he spent time in the country with friends and family and Monica while preparing for his baptism. The conversations recorded from this period give us another really cool glimpse of Monica that I think deserves some attention because she participated in these philosophical discussions.

Now, you have to understand Monica is remembered entirely for motherhood. And listen, as a mom, it is the greatest and most important thing I will ever do. But it's not the only thing I do, Augustine though portrays her as engaging with questions and having a wisdom in this group and happiness that he saw in her when she was around this group of very educated

Men. And she could hold her own.

I think was probably what impressed him most. Because unlike Augustine, she had never received a formal education in like a formal rhetorical education. Yet he was able to recognize that this intelligence was formed through her faith, through her experience, and through her years of paying attention. And so

At the Easter Vigil in the year three hundred and eighty seven, Ambrose baptized Augustine in Milan.

He was thirty two years old. And his friend Alypius received baptism alongside him. And so did his teenage son Adeodatus. And somewhere in that space, breathing their same air, was Monica.

And she was a woman who had believed her son was spiritually dead, who wept and grieved for him. She now watched her son and her grandson enter the waters of baptism. And Augustine later remembers being overcome. By the music and hymns of the church during this period.

This professional rhetorician, who

had spent years, years, years, years, years, years, years evaluating words. Found himself overcome by emotions. When ordinary, maybe uneducated Christians, they just sang together simple hymns. And there is just something so lovely about that I think.

Because like the intensity that survived his conversion, it is just so perfect. His conversion did not diminish his intellect his hunger, for beauty his desire to recognize these beautiful things. And it also didn't diminish his capacity for friendship because all of those things continued shaping his life. But his Christian faith, his conversion, now gave him a new center of gravity, And Augustine would spend the remainder of his life learning what that meant.

So after his baptism, Augustine planned to return to North Africa with Monica, Adeodatus, and several other friends. On their journey, it took them to this place called Ostia, which is a it was a port city just outside of Rome, where they waited for a ship. And at some point, Monica and Augustine, they were standing together overlooking a garden and they just began talking. And the conversation moved toward heaven, eternal life.

And Augustine describes the two of them reaching together through contemplation toward this fleeting sense of the eternal reality that they were discussing. This scene has become known as the Vision of Ostia. I would I would be remiss if I didn't remind you of the juxtaposition of how when they were preparing, themselves for another journey standing by another port, right? Augustine had sailed away from her, now

some time later.

They were preparing to do this together. The son who had once ran from her so completely could finally see her and love her and understand what she desired for him. And he could see the face of God in her

while they had this time in Ostia, Monica told him about the hope she had for him and how that hope had kept her going because she really believed, like it had to happen. All she wanted to see was him become a Christian before she died.

It's like

Okay, I did this thing, I've seen through, her life's mission almost. Some days later she develops a fever. And as her condition worsened

Augustine's brother expressed regret that she might die far from North Africa and be buried away from her husband. But Monica she didn't care where they put her body.

She asked them to remember her at the Lord's altar. And that is such a beautiful Catholic small detail,

Because after crossing countries and raising children, surviving a volatile marriage, chasing Augustine across the Mediterranean and praying enough tears, into the ground that he could still remember them years after she passed when he was writing this book. Monica's only concern at that point was that her family remember her at Mass. And she died in Ostia in three eighty seven, she was fifty six years old.

And when she died, Augustine closed her eyes, and suddenly the man whose mother had spent years crying for him had to learn to cry for her. And Augustine had initially actually tried to control his grief because he felt Christians should face death with hope. But eventually he did give himself permission to weep. And there is a line near the end of this account that

I think we should pay attention to.

Because now he understood her tears differently. He had become the answer she did not live long enough to see fully unfold. Monica died before Augustine became the Augustine that we remember,

She didn't live to see him become ordained as a priest or the bishop of Hippo, and she never read his book, Confessions. And so she would never realize in this life anyway, that her son would immortalise her prayers.

And she certainly had no idea that generations over a thousand years later people would be talking about her and being inspired by her faith and her hope and her love for her son

she definitely wouldn't know that we would be asking her to intercede and pray for our own children, our own wayward children, Or that we would ask her to help us have the same persistent faith despite so many disappointments. And Augustine did eventually return to North Africa and when he did, he was hoping he'd have like a very simple, and, fairly secluded communal life, But he visited Hippo and he realized the Christian community there needed a priest, and Augustine found himself essentially drafted by popular demand. And so he was ordained in three ninety one and by three ninety five he had become bishop of Hippo. That was a responsibility he carried for the rest of his life.

Even the plans he had made for himself after his conversion, right? He was like, I'm just gonna have a nice quiet little life and read my little books and be an intellect. No. Instead, he got to spend decades preaching, using that skill of rhetoric, writing, resolving disputes, caring for his church, and responding to theological controversies, training clergy.

And producing a body of work that honestly would become the foundation for Western Christianity. He wrote Confessions and it is honestly a strange but really beautiful autobiography. Autobiographies It really is. He did write about the Trinity, creation, scripture, grace, free will, original sin, human desire, memory, time, politics, marriage, and the sacraments.

And we Catholics we read him and we eat him up and so do Protestants. And people that aren't even like, Christian or philosophers or whatever, they also read him psychologists find him fascinating. And people who don't even know who he is will repin his quotes on Pinterest, which I'm I'm okay with. It's it's just so crazy to me because Dolly Parton died this week and she's kind of one of these people that like everyone loved her, right?

It doesn't it didn't matter like what your political beliefs were or even if you didn't particularly like country music, right? And

Augustine is one of those people that people will quote him. And they don't agree on anything else. And I think that's just lovely.

I really do. I think why that happens is because he was very willing to be very

honest about himself and

take a vulnerable moment, to share about himself in a time when it wasn't really a thing to go so internally and kinda lay yourself bare like that. What he wrote about it wasn't flattering. It wasn't like, the angelic saints that we think come out of the womb perfect.

No. Majority of them don't. And Augustine understood that restlessness that we all feel,

so at the beginning of confessions, Augustine tells God that very beautiful quote that I say here every single episode, right? Which is the human heart remains restless until it rests in him.

And I my fear is that

quote is gonna become so familiar that it's just gonna be like, such a nice little religious sentiment, I put it into the song I wrote. Well nine yards. The thing is, actually it's it's so important and I don't want it to lose its value or its meaning. Because we live in a society that we are constantly striving for more, for more.

Like, seeking the next best thing that our culture tells us that,

we need to consume, consume, consume. And the thing that we're needing, the joy that our we want, our restlessness, is not gonna come in our next Amazon delivery. It's just not. And

I don't want us to lose sight of that.

Okay. Because whatever thing that we want, once we get it, there's gonna be something else at the end, right? So like you buy this house, you think it's your dream house, and then three doors down, another house is listed, same price that you bought yours a few months ago, and it's got a better kitchen. It's like it's always something, right?

And

Augustine's language for desire came from a world that didn't have the Amazon prime but the heart that desires that thing that you saw on TikTok shop. Still is the same. And he learned to pay attention to what the heart desires because it can be very revealing, right? Beauty awakens something even in Augustine, right?

Why is that? Because as humans we are drawn to beauty. We are made for beautiful things. And love also awakens something in Augustine, Why?

Because we are made to love. And the truth of knowing in his mind that Christianity was right, it nearly drove him crazy. Why is that? Because we have intellect.

God gave us a mind and we are capable of knowing these things. And yeah, the finite things that Augustine carried, they had genuine goodness. But they also kept pointing beyond themselves, And it was that insight that allowed Augustine to understand his entire life. The years he spent wondering became part of the story of a restless creature trying to locate the destination of his own desire.

And that may be why Augustine speaks so effectively to people who feel spiritually unsettled. Restlessness can become very meaningful information. Sometimes, like the ache that you feel, the constant searching that you're doing is telling you that you've been asking for temporary things to satisfy this hunger that

you know, it can't match, essentially. And so I wanna jump back to Monica for a second here because by now we all know how her story ends, right?

Augustine converted. And people I feel like turn Saint Monica into a spiritual formula for parents only, right? Pray long enough and your kid comes back. Say enough novenas and the ending arrives.

Christian life it's it's not a vending machine. Okay, you don't put in a prayer and get what you want back. It just doesn't work that way. There are mothers right now who have prayed for their children for decades and died, and those children were so far from the faith.

There are fathers asking God to deliver a son or a daughter from addiction who have spent years waking up afraid of the next phone call. And there are grandparents praying for grandchildren they barely get to see. And even spouses, right? Carrying grief privately in their own hearts because their spouse will never come with them to mass.

And I think Monica especially belongs really close to those people because her holiness. Developed in those moments. It didn't develop at her happy ending. And I'm I'm bringing this back up because

I don't want this to feel like a motivational montage.

You'll see on your social feed, okay? What did the bishop tell Monica? Very wisely. Augustine needed time to discover the weaknesses in his Manichaeism belief through his own intellectual journey.

And that conversion eventually needed a bunch of other people, And other steps he had to go through. And Monica remained a part of his story, but she wasn't the author of it. That's the heart of her story. Many people we love have an interior life with God, it that don't belong to us, We parents can teach our children the prayers, we can model the faith, we can apologize for our failures, answer questions and remain available to them, and I certainly encourage you to

speak about the faith and to find ways to talk about the faith that aren't related to any catechetical thing.

You can just be like, look how Christian this person is being by doing this or that was so kind of you to hold the door. What a lovely thing you did for that lady. Stuff like that. But we can do all these things and our children still need to encounter God on their own and have that freedom to do that.

We can't control what that outcome is,

Monica sometimes pushed very hard, And

had to be told to give her son room, to step back. As a mom who is super close with her children, that is something that I'm having to learn. And it's not easy. It actually freaking sucks.

Not gonna lie. We have to learn to love our children at every stage. And every

step that they go through and we have to walk with them. But we can't dictate what road they take.

Monica's prayer did become big enough. To survive the fact that her son took a path that looked completely different than the one she had designed and paid for, right, through all that education and sacrifice. Augustine was still Augustine. Even after he converted, he acknowledged his past, He had a son out of wedlock, he hurt a lot of people, his mother included,

he spent years advocating for ideas that he's later rejected, It's kind of like the people who, are very pro choice and then eventually come to realize, hmm, wow, that was actually a mistake.

I didn't realize abortion entailed all that,

And Augustine, realized, and this is another lesson that we can take from him, is that we are not defined by our mistakes. We are not our mistakes, near the end of his own life, after constantly reflecting upon the things he had done in his life, he wrote retractions,

And this is where he revisits his earlier writings. And he

corrects or qualifies things he thought needed another look. Which I'm just like, that's amazing, right?

I mean my daughter right now is like completely obsessed with the Broadway show Hamilton, And so we've been talking about Alexander Hamilton and he had such an intellect. And reading about Augustine, I kind of think they were very much the same kind of person,

Augustine

he had one of the greatest minds Of his time. And in Christian history even I think. And he was still willing to

essentially write.

Actually upon further review, I have some notes. His willingness to keep examining himself and understanding that people are people and he's not any different. He never wrote that becoming Christian made self knowledge unnecessary. Actually I think it's probably the opposite, His grace the grace he received opened the possibility of him seeing himself more fully.

And Augustine lived and did that for the rest of his life. Eventually he developed a fever and became ill. He died in the year of four thirty. In his seventies.

His friend Possidius later wrote an early biography of him. Described the elderly bishop preparing for death through prayer and repentance. Augustine had penitential psalms placed where he could read them from his bed. Isn't that great?

I think that's just amazing because

You're talking about someone who has spent decades finding words for God, But at the end he prayed the Psalms. That's just so beautiful because when we think about the prayers that his mother had said for him and the tears that she wept on his deathbed, he was asking God for mercy. Augustine died on August twenty eighth in the year four thirty. We only know Monica because he wrote about her.

And he certainly didn't have to, He could have still become Augustine and never had to tell the story about how he lied to her, how he injured her, about how she loved wine. And he certainly didn't have to remember the marriage she had to his father. But he also remembered her humor, her temperament, her conversations, arguments, and more than anything he remembered her tears. Tears that had fallen into ordinary dirt in ordinary places by a mother who was frightened and asked God to save her son.

I keep coming back. To the image Augustine gave us in the beginning, The ground underneath Monica's eyes becoming wet. Because prayer in itself sometimes can feel of unimpressive, Like you say the same prayers over and over again or you just be like Lord, please, you ask for the same grace over and over again. You bring God the same anxiety you brought yesterday.

And discover tomorrow that you still have some of that same anxiety. Yet, What do we do? We continue to get up and we continue to go on with our lives. And Monica did that for years.

And sometimes it's very hard to see how God is moving. She couldn't see God moving and how her prayers were affecting Augustine. The thing is had he not been who he was when she was weeping and

wetting the ground with her tears, his wrong turns, his mistakes would have never produced the body of work, the insights that they later did. And so he had to go through that to become who he was meant to be.

And I say that because if you're in a place right now where you're feeling stuck or not good enough

Or like God is just not answering your prayers. I'm here to tell you that your story's not done. Whatever you're doing. Continue doing it.

Say those prayers. Even if it's just my favorite prayer sometimes, I think it's the one Joseph must have prayed when he was trying to find someplace for Mary. Lord, help me. And I think that's the thing that sometimes can be the most hard to remember is

Grace is working through a story that you don't know the ending to.

And so that's what I want you to remember. Remember that because you might be the Augustine in this story, or you might be the Monica, or you might be the Ambrose. Just don't know. And if your life feels disordered or your prayer life, your faith feels disorganized, maybe you have questions that you're like afraid to ask about the faith.

Or maybe you happen to have on this podcast and you haven't been to Mass or the church in ten years. You've the last time you went to confession was when you made your first one. It's okay. God is just right there waiting for you.

No judgment. And if you have made decisions, choices, that changed the shape of your life permanently, and you cannot possibly imagine how holiness could fit around them. I think Augustine would have a few things to say about that. Because Christian history contains one of the greatest saints, precisely because.

God did not abandon a complicated man in the middle of a complicated life who had a very sinful way of living. I say that because Augustine eventually was able to look back and realize that God was there throughout all of those years, but he couldn't see it. And my lovely, lovely, beautiful rebels, that is where his famous restlessness becomes so beautiful. The heart keeps searching because it was made for something enormous.

And sometimes the long road home teaches us enough about our hunger that when grace finally reaches the place we have spent years defending, we recognize what we were looking for all along. I'm sure Monica understood that before Augustine did. She loved him enough to keep carrying him in prayer while his own journey unfolded. But she also had to learn that journey belonged to him.

So maybe that's why the feast days belong together. So today we remember the mother whose tears watered the ground. And tomorrow we remember the son those tears were shed for. Together they remind us that holiness rarely arrives according to schedule.

Conversion has a history before anybody sees the result. Love cannot force another human soul open, and God is remarkably comfortable working with people whose lives

have become complicated. So if you're praying for an Augustine, keep praying and keep loving the actual person standing in front of you. Even if it's the person staring back at you in the mirror.

Because if you are Augustine, I just need to remind you, he took the scenic route. And maybe this is that point where you got off the ship and now your life's about to change. Saint Monica, pray for us. Saint Augustine, pray for us.

And may the God who heard the prayers that once watered the earth beneath Monica's face hear every restless heart still trying to find its way home. I'm Nicole. This is Rebel Saints. Restless heart.

You are welcome here.