On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

by James K.A. Smith

SUCH MOTHERS ARE like sacramental echoes of the unfailing love of God, the Shepherd who goes looking for lost sheep, the Father who welcomes prodigals at the end of the lane because he’s already been there looking for them. Such mothers are preambles to grace, a grace before grace, a primal, natal grace. Indeed, years after Monica’s death, Augustine, preaching a sermon in Carthage, considers the motherlike grace of God and the Godlike virtue of maternal devotion. He is meditating on Jesus’s promise to “gather the chicks of Jerusalem under his wings [Matt. 23:37], like a hen that is weakened with her babies.” He is struck by the power of maternal “weakness,” the saving power of the one who humbled himself, a power that mothers exhibit every day. “This is maternal love, expressing itself as weakness,” he tells his congregation. “All this is the mark of a mother’s weakness, not of lost majesty.” The mother, in other words, is an icon of the incarnation, that central mystery of the faith, in which the God of the universe would humble Godself, become human, and take on our sin and brokenness (“we confess that he participated in our weakness, but not in our iniquity, to the end that by sharing weakness with us he might destroy our iniquity”).20 That kind of “power” is often despised in a world that can only imagine power as domination, in a patriarchal world—let’s be honest—where power is confused with testosterone-laden bravado. But Augustine is reminding us of that uniquely ma...