The Sons of Such Tears

Several years ago I read St. Augustine's Confessions. It was a difficult book for me to read--not because it was badly-written or slow-paced, but because I honestly struggle with feeling guilty over the slightest things. St. Augustine was a philosopher as well as a penitent, and in Confessions he analyzes the specific wrongnesses of even his earliest sins, slight sins such as infantile jealousy and stealing apples from neighboring orchards. Suddenly every crime of mine seemed to loom large.

But I finished it and I'm glad I did, because the book was very well worth reading. It was only today that I realized just how worth reading it was. All apple orchards aside, what, exactly, where Augustine's sins? What were the things that kept his mother, St. Monica, awake at night?

In the modern eye, not much. He lived with a woman who wasn't his wife, but he was never unfaithful to her. He disbelieved the Bible and sought out strange superstitions, but nothing odder than your average horoscope. He stayed up nights carousing, but he wasn't a mindless drunk; he was a learned man, a teacher, soft and stern and (probably) clean-shaven. He goes on for page after wretched page about how much he regrets the nights he spent at the theater. The reader might scoff at this, until he catches the footnote explaining that theater in Augustine's time was often centered around onstage sex. And even then the reader might scoff. Okay, so St. Augustine watched pornography. Why not? Lots of young men watch pornography. They're even told, and constantly, that it's healthy. In fact, at this point Augustine's life is starting to look like the PC ideal. He's a boy scout.

What makes St. Augustine any different from the skeptical, intelligent, partygoing, cohabiting, occasionally pornography-watching nice guy of today?

There was one major difference. St. Augustine had a mother who didn't hold with all of that.

His father didn't mind it. He was open-minded. He was a pagan himself, and he was proud of his son. He couldn't wait to have grandchildren; he didn't care if the mother was married to his son or not. But to St. Monica, it mattered. She went around to all the churches; she prayed as hard as she could. She loved that son of hers, and not just because he had a nice smile or because everyone praised his writing; she loved him so much that she was willing to do anything to bring him back to God. One priest, wearying of her pleading and crying, told her, "Go away from me now. As you live, it is impossible that the son of such tears should perish." She took his words as a sign.

"As you live, it is impossible that the son of such tears should perish." There are boys today who go astray, good boys whose mothers care about them and love them. Are any of them the sons of tears?

We have hope, because I think that they are. If anything gets to Jesus--and everything gets to Jesus--it is the tears of a mother for her son. What mother ever shed more tears than Mary?

The fatherless boys, the motherless boys, the boys with no one to pray for them, have something on their side, even if they don't know it. As long as we have Mary, we have a mother who pleads relentlessly, unceasingly, for her sons to come home.

And as long as we have faith in God's infinite mercy and love, it is impossible that they should perish.