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

by James K.A. Smith

Again each night and dawn and sleepless All years long. Having seen that mother’s love, I testify: It was ocean endless. One drop could’ve Brought to life the deadest Christ.18 I know this mother. She sleeps beside me every night. She prays at a Pentecostal church in Lagos every Wednesday. She is awake in Rio, heart whirring, until the door clicks and the light goes out. She keeps prescriptions filled in Los Angeles like a sacramental fight against the darkness. . . . Her name is Monica. She is legion. Not long after his conversion, in one of his early works, Augustine comments on an episode in which a grieving widow approaches Jesus because now she has also lost her only son (Luke 7:12–15). He had compassion on her, Luke tells us, and Jesus raises him from the dead. Augustine, from his own experience, knows the power of a mother’s faith: “What benefit did the widow’s son get from his faith, which he certainly did not have while he was dead? Yet his mother’s faith was so beneficial to him that he was restored to life.”