Overview:

The Memorial of St. Monica

A Reflection for the Memorial of St. Monica

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Stay awake!
For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.
Be sure of this:
if the master of the house
had known the hour of night when the thief was coming,
he would have stayed awake
and not let his house be broken into.
So too, you also must be prepared,
for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come. (Mt 24:42-51)

Find today’s readings here.

One of the first articles I ever wrote for America was a review of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,” which had a 2005 run at The Public Theater in New York. Directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman (with America’s own Jim Martin, S.J., as a theological advisor) and starring Sam Rockwell as Judas, the play also included turns by Eric Bogosian as Satan, Stephen McKinley Henderson as Pontius Pilate and Elizabeth Rodriguez as St. Monica. In that last role, Rodriguez brought a different energy to the St. Monica we might know from hagiographies or her son’s Confessions, playing her as a fast-talking and somewhat foul-mouthed mom who has ambitious plans for her son.

I thought of that performance when contemplating today’s Memorial of St. Monica, because St. Augustine’s mother is so often portrayed as a passive, long-suffering woman who patiently endures the crimes and misdemeanors of her ne’er-do-well husband and troublesome son. You don’t even need to read Augustine’s account to find this general theme, as the standard description of St. Monica is of a pious and prayerful but somewhat powerless figure.

Rodriguez’s Monica wasn’t like that. When she talked to God, she said, “I get results.” Prayer for her was not a many-decades vale of tears, but a living interaction with God (albeit one that might have entailed a great deal of frustration on St. Monica’s part), with whom she had a special connection. In her words, “I nagged and nagged and nagged” until God got tired of her nagging and relented. (The script might be a bit more colorful than that.) 

St. Monica knew neither the day nor the hour that God would answer her pleas. None of us do. Jesus uses a striking image to illustrate that reality in today’s Gospel, comparing himself to a thief in the night come to rob an unprepared household. Except the master in today’s reading is the opposite of Monica. Not only is Monica prepared for the coming of the Lord, she is actively seeking Him out. Her relationship with God is one of action, not of a glum acceptance of her lot in life.

If in my mind I place St. Monica in the master’s house in today’s Gospel, I don’t imagine her going from room to room checking to make sure doors and windows are locked. I imagine her out in the yard, in the street, calling out to the presence she knows is lurking there somewhere. 

There is a lesson there for me, both in the Gospel and in the story of St. Monica: In your prayer, be receptive, but be active, too. God doesn’t mind being asked. If we believe Stephen Adly Guirgis and St. Monica, God doesn’t even mind being nagged.

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.