“How did you do it?” A friend asked me not long ago. “Your husband wasn’t Catholic when you started dating, but he became Catholic after meeting you. How did you do it?”
I hesitated a moment. My friend had a vested interest in the answer, as she was hoping for the conversion of her boyfriend. But I had a feeling she wasn’t going to like my response.
“Honestly, I didn’t ‘do’ anything. You have to totally give it to God,” I said. God speaks directly to each human heart, as he did for St. Carlo, and my experience is that trying to force that relationship for someone else often backfires.
“The most important thing I did was never to push my faith on him,” I tried to explain. “When we started dating, I decided I wouldn’t talk about religion unless he brought it up first or asked me a question about it. I never wanted him to feel that I was pressuring him. Here’s what I did instead: I secretly prayed and fasted for his conversion, trusting that God would make it happen without me saying anything.”
And He did. God put the right people, circumstances, books, and conversations in place that led my then-boyfriend to convert to Catholicism after only a handful of talks between us about the faith that is central to my existence.
I thought about that conversation recently as I read St. Augustine’s Confessions. His mother, St. Monica, prayed so hard for his conversion that she has become the go-to saint for parents of wayward children, with a recent book named after her called What Would Monica Do? Much of St. Monica’s response to the wayward behavior of her son and husband reminded me of what I told my friend, although of course, she perfected these responses in a way I can only dream of!
1Prudent silence
Regarding her husband, St. Monica famously advised other women to be “patient, silent, and prayerful” in the face of unbelief, gently reminding them that “it takes more strength to remain silent than it does to speak.” Her example inspired at least one woman to write that St. Monica taught her to bite her tongue!
She did talk to her son about God quite a lot; the relationship between a mother and son is different than that of spouses or people dating. So naturally, as a mother, she felt it was her duty to instruct her son.
During the 30-plus years before his conversion, she found many opportunities to talk to St. Augustine about God, again observing prudent wisdom:
During his rebellious years, Augustine said that God was not silent but spoke to him through his mother. “Then whose words were they but yours which you were chanting in my ears through my mother, your faithful servant?”
2Perseverance in prayer
When St. Augustine was far from God, St. Monica’s unceasing prayers for him are the stuff of legend.
He writes in his Confessions that she was “strong in the power of spiritual holiness, and ardently prayerful” for the salvation of her children, weeping for him “more than mothers weep when lamenting their dead children.”
Her constant prayers for him led St. Ambrose prophetically to tell her, “It cannot be that the son of those tears should perish.”
3Unconditional love
She loved him faithfully through it all: He wrote, “I cannot sufficiently express the love she had for me, nor how she travailed for me in the spirit with a far keener anguish than when she bore me in the flesh.”
One writer described the effect of her powerful love in this way:
In the end, it wasn’t Monica’s words or her ability to philosophize that changed Augustine. It was her love, her prayer, and the fact that she was always available to him, ready to help him when his time finally came. Her love and concern for Augustine never wavered.
Prudence, including knowing when to speak and when to keep silent; unending prayers; faithful love — these are the hardest things to practice, aren’t they? But if we can dig deep and ask God to help us, they make all the difference, both to us and to our loved ones.
