Saturday, August 27, 2022
Memorial of Saint Monica (mother of Saint Augustine)
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Let the commotion of the flesh fall silent
A man went on a journey. To one servant he gave five talents, to another two, and to a third, one. Then he went away.
In Book IX, Chapter 10 of his Confessions, St. Augustine wrote about his mother, Monnica, who long before had taken responsibility for her son’s path to salvation. Overlooking their garden in Ostia (a neighborhood of Rome) nine days before her death, mother and son had a conversation best described in Latin as a momentum intelligentiae, a moment of understanding and comprehension of the life of heaven. Their conversation became a prayer, as they talked about higher and higher things.
When the master of these servants returned, he settled accounts. The one who had received five talents came forward bringing an additional five. And his master said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come and share your master’s joy.”
And that is just what Augustine and his mother did, shared in their master’s joy. In remembrance, Augustine is once again carried away:
So we said: “If the commotion of the flesh were to fall silent in a man, silent the images of the earth and the waters and the air, and silent the heavens, and the soul were silent to itself and by not thinking of itself would surpass itself, if all dreams and imaginary revelations were silent, and silent every tongue and every sign and all that exists only transiently, since if anyone could hear these things then this is what they all would say: ‘We did not make ourselves, but He who abides in eternity made us.’
If having said this they fell silent, having led us to open our ears to Him who made these things, and He alone would speak through Himself and not through them so that we would hear His Word not through a tongue of flesh, nor through an angel’s voice, nor through the thundering sound from the clouds, nor through an obscure enigma, but we might hear Him whom in these things we love, hear Him without these things, just as we now reached out and in swift thought touched the Wisdom that abides over all things in eternity.
If this could continue, and other visions that were far inferior could be withdrawn, and could this vision ravish and absorb and envelop its beholder in inward joys, so that eternal life would be like that one moment of understanding for which we longed, then would this not mean: ‘Enter into the joy of your Lord’?
And when would that be? When we shall all rise again, though we shall not all be changed?
Within an hour Monica fell ill, was revived, and fell ill again. What did she see in those moments of unconsciousness? “What am I doing here?” she asked her sons. And later she remonstrated with them, “Bury this body anywhere, and do not worry about such trifles as which country. Nothing and nowhere is far away from God. The only thing I ask of you is that wherever you may be, you will remember me at the Lord’s altar.”
(1 Corinthians 1, Psalm 33, John 13, Matthew 25)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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