Meditation on the Feast of St. Monica

This week has been so full of activity that I can hardly remember everything I've done, but it has been a great opportunity to get to really know my way around campus and meet new people. I'm really starting to settle into my new home.

Home: how strange to have lived in the same place for my whole life and now to call elsewhere by the same name. But as I'm in International Studies and I hope to travel and live in Europe someday, I suppose I'll have to get used to calling many places home, though I suspect nowhere is quite like home except when we die and reach our true Home.

Speaking of which, today I visited St. Mary's Catholic Center here, which is fortuitously just across the street from where I live. It is literally within walking distance and is as far or closer than many other places I have walked to on campus. Having spent most of the day at the library with my friend Meghan, I had decided to stop by the anthropology building to check on a class that is still up in the air and realised that I was not far from the church, and it was 4:30 so I might be able to make it in time for confession.

Stepping into a Catholic church is always a restorative experience for me. While each one may appear completely different from another, they all share the same hushed, otherworldly atmosphere of divinity-come-to-earth, the gateway between caelum et terra. It is so reassuring to be able to go anywhere in the world and to be able to step out of the world into another realm where one can truly feel a part of the Communion of Saints across not only space, but across time as well. And with the constant bustle and activity around campus during this transitory week, when many things are changing, it was a true Godsend to be able to find a sanctuary of peace amidst the chaos, and a place that I can just as surely call home as I can my parish in Austin.

I truly believe that it was no chance incident that I visited St. Mary's today. It happens that August 27 is the feast day of St. Monica, mother to the great and much more famous St. Augustine, whose feast day is tomorrow and whose Confessions I have been reading recently, and her story is an interesting and inspiring one, to be sure.

You see, St. Augustine was not always the holy man he eventually became, and it was only due to the grace of God through the prayers of his mother for thirty years that he abandoned his immoral lifestyle and became a baptised Christian. But beyond even this, St. Monica earlier in life broke her drinking habits when she was accused of being a drunk by a servant, and she later developed a reputation for being an excellent listener and peacemaker.

All this is to say that I could not help but feel that she played a special role in my seemingly spontaneous urge to visit St. Mary's today to receive the sacrament of Reconciliation and afterward attend daily mass. And just at a critical point of transition in my life when I'm becoming a young adult like her own son, charged with making my own decisions now. In the short time I've lived here, I've already had to turn down four invitations to parties where I knew there would be drinking, and given the close quarters in which we students live now, there are bound to be disagreements, so I feel especially thankful for the witness of St. Monica to truly be an instrument of peace amidst a "crooked and perverse generation."

I'll close with a short quote by the great woman herself as she was lying on her deathbed speaking to her beloved Augustine:

My son, as to me, I no longer find any pleasure in this life. What more I have to do here and why I am still here I do not know, since I have no longer anything to hope for in this world. There was only one reason why I wanted to stay a little longer in this life, and that was that I should see you a Catholic before I died. Now God has granted me this beyond my hopes. For I see that you have despised the pleasures of this world and have become his servant. So what am I doing here?

"For I see that you have despised the pleasures of this world and have become his servant." That I might be able to live up to such words myself someday I can not only hope, but try.

St. Monica, pray for us.