In you Lord have I found my peace. The Church honors today the memory of St. Monica, the mother of the great St. Augustine. A Christian woman, St. Monica was married to a pagan husband whose conversion to Christianity she won after thirty years of prayer. However, that is not all that she had to deal with. For even as she was praying for the conversion of her husband, her eldest son, Augustine, whom she had raised in the Church, fell into a life of licentiousness and heresy (Augustine’s search for “truth” led to him embracing some heretical schools of thought). St. Monica spent many years on her knees offering prayers to God for the conversion of her son. The Lord answered her prayers and Augustine finally turned his life around and was baptized by St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan. Because of her prayerful intervention in the conversion of her husband and son, St. Monica is the patroness of married women and of mothers.
St. Monica was successful in praying for the conversion of her husband and son because she believed in the power of God’s grace. She trusted that her tearful prayers and supplications would find favor with God. Even as years turned into decades, she never ceased praying to God because she knew that God would never let her down. As the response to today’s Psalm states, she found her peace in the Lord. She remained hopeful in the knowledge that the Lord never forsakes his own. The Lord who wishes that none of what he has created should get lost (cf. John 6:39; 17:12) but instead come to the knowledge of truth and be saved (cf. I Timothy 2:4) was surely not going to let her husband and son remain in the dark. In heeding Jesus’ teaching about prayer (cf. Luke 11:5-13), Monica believed with her whole heart that the merciful Father would not refuse to answer her prayers. And even if it seemed like an eternity, her prayers were finally answered. St. Monica is a model for all Christians on how to persist in prayer.