At the Window of Ostia Before Eternity: A Mother's Final Testament

Cool baptismal water streamed across Aurelius Augustinus's forehead beneath the tall golden flame of the Paschal candle while the clean fragrance of beeswax and sacred chrism filled the octagonal stone baptistery of Milan. It was Easter Vigil night, April twenty-fourth into the twenty-fifth, three hundred and eighty-seven. Dripping beside him in fresh white linen stood his steadfast friend Alypius and his fifteen-year-old son Adeodatus; standing quietly near the rear stone screen, fifty-five-year-old Monica closed her weathered eyelids as Bishop Ambrose's antiphonal Psalms rolled across the vaulting, feeling thirty years of thorns slide out of her breastbone at last.

Six months later, autumn winds turned the mouth of the Tiber River silver-violet at Ostia Tiberina, Rome's sea-harbor. Stand still before the breathtaking circle drawn by the finger of God! Four years earlier at Carthage quay, white Roman sails had carried a lying son away across the surf from a mother weeping on wet stone. Now at Ostia quay, white sails rocked gently at anchor waiting to carry widowed mother and newly baptized son homeward together to North Africa. The fugitive hull had become a vessel of communion.

Resting from their long overland march down Italy's spine while seamen loaded provisions into the hold, Monica and Augustine stood alone together one hushed late afternoon, leaning against an arched stone window frame that overlooked the inner courtyard garden of their lodging house—far removed from the shouting of stevedores and river barges. Neither suspected that inside five days a fierce marsh fever would strike her onto her deathbed. Speaking softly side by side, forgetting every wound behind them, they inquired between themselves what the eternal life of the saints—which eye has not seen, nor ear heard—might actually be like.

Gasping with inward thirst for the living fountain of God, the conversation of mother and son climbed rung after rung above every visible creature. Together their minds rose past the green herbs of the courtyard below, past the rolling Mediterranean, past the wheeling firmament of sun, moon, and constellations. Ascending higher still above their own memories and the sequential syllables of human thought, they stretched their spirits upward until they brushed that unchangeable Eternal Wisdom through whom all things are made—Wisdom wherein there is neither yesterday nor tomorrow, only infinite Is.

And right there, while they spoke and panted after Her, for the space of one whole beat of the heart, mother and son touched that Eternal Life slightly together! Then they sighed, left the first-fruits of their spirits bound fast above, and descended gently back to the sound of their own human voices—where every spoken word has a beginning and an end. Suppose every tumult of flesh fell still, every phantom of earth, sea, and starlight grew mute, and even the soul kept silence to hear the Creator Himself speaking without veil or passing symbol: would not that single heartbeat stretched across forever be the exact meaning of Enter into the joy of your Lord?

Right beside that cool stone window sill at Ostia as twilight deepened, Monica turned her clear, tranquil gaze upon her son and spoke the quiet farewell that unlocked her entire earthly pilgrimage: Son, for my own part, nothing in this life affords me delight anymore. What I am still to do here, and why I remain down here, I do not know, now that all my hope in this world is accomplished.

Listen to the victorious humility of the widow's next breath: There was one reason alone why I desired to tarry a little longer in this life: that I might see you a Catholic Christian before I died. My God has granted me this far more abundantly still—that I now behold you despising earthly felicity to become His servant. What am I doing here? Across three decades she had clung to breath like a sentry refusing to desert a watchtower through a blizzard; the instant her child stood safely inside the citadel of grace, the sentry lowered her spear.

Barely five days after that window colloquy, burning fever seized her frail frame. One afternoon she sank into total unconsciousness; when Augustine and his brother Navigius rushed trembling around her cot, she opened her eyes slowly, asked Where was I?, and seeing both sons frozen with grief, delivered seven words that stunned the room: Here you shall bury your mother. Navigius protested on the spot—praying aloud that she might recover and die back home in Africa rather than abroad, since for years back in Numidia Monica had carefully prepared her own burial niche right beside the grave of her late husband Patricius!

Fixing Navigius with a gentle look of reproach before turning her eyes straight onto Augustine, the dying widow severed her final thread to earthly dust: See how he talks! Lay this body anywhere at all; let anxiety over it trouble you in no way whatsoever. This one thing alone do I ask of you—that you remember me at the Altar of the Lord, wherever you may be. When astonished friends asked afterward whether she did not dread leaving her body so far across the sea from her own town, she answered with radiant Paschal certainty: Nothing is far from God; and there is no fear that at the end of the world He will not know from where to raise me up!

On the ninth day of her illness, in the fifty-sixth year of her life and the thirty-third year of Augustine's, that religious and devout soul was loosed from the body. Young Adeodatus burst out weeping aloud until the household quieted him; Augustine himself held every tear locked behind iron self-command throughout the funeral psalmody and throughout the Eucharistic Sacrifice offered right beside the open grave before her body was lowered into Ostia's soil—judging it unfitting to mourn with hopeless lamentation a soul that had neither died miserably nor died altogether.

Only late that night, alone upon his bed after waking from exhaustion, when Saint Ambrose's evening hymn echoed across his memory and he recalled her tireless tenderness through his childhood illnesses and the thirty years she had travailed in tears to bring him to eternal birth, did the future Doctor of Grace finally let his tears stream freely onto his pillow before God alone—begging every reader across future centuries down to you tonight to remember Monica and Patricius at the Eucharistic Altar. Sixteen hundred years have rolled over Ostia's harbor. Empires have turned to ash, yet every vigil flame kindled tonight by a mother or father praying through darkness for a wandering child still burns with that same unquenchable promise: Go in peace; a child of so many tears can never perish.