When your children leave the faith: Homily for Tuesday, August 27, 2024
To see as God sees. That’s probably the best definition of wisdom that I’ve heard. To see as God sees. And, if we’re going to really see as God sees, then the Book of Wisdom tells us this, that true wisdom is found in the fear of the Lord.
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When your children leave the faith
Today we celebrate Saint Monica, who I think in some ways for many is an example, a patron. People whose adult children have left the faith, which is what happened to Augustine.
Augustine was very bright, as we know, because he’s left us so many of his writings, but he was also self-indulgent. He was selfish. And Monica, his mother, worried greatly about what would become of him.
She’s a great example to us of a very important reality, how important it is to persevere in prayer. She could have prayed a few times and then just thought it was futile and stopped, but she did not.
In fact, she continued to pray over and over again. She tried to interact with her son on multiple occasions, but without success. In fact, she discovered an important lesson sometimes when it comes to bringing people into the faith. Sometimes you need someone else.
And for her, the someone else was Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, who in fact was the one who, engaging Augustine in conversations, brought about the conversion of Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine was moved by God’s grace through Ambrose and the prayer of his mother.
The interesting thing as we look at the world today is that it could be easy to give up on prayer. Things seem to be getting worse, not better, and there’s no end to the things about which we should pray.
But Saint Monica is an important example for each one of us. Her perseverance in prayer brought about one of the great saints of the church, and her perseverance in prayer was the means, too, of her salvation. Let us ask the Lord to fill us with perseverance in prayer so that we might place our faith in the God who never disappoints.
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