Prayer to St Monica for a son or a daughter
St Monica, you followed him across the sea. You wept for him in Carthage and wept for him in Rome and wept for him in Milan, and for seventeen years the only news was that he had gone further away. A bishop told you to stop arguing with your son and start talking to God about him. He told you the son of these tears could not be lost. Hold me to that now. Pray for N., whom I carry and cannot reach. Ask God to arrange what I cannot arrange: the friend, the book, the illness, the sentence overheard in a garden, the sudden unbearable tiredness of a life without him. Teach me your patience, which was never resignation. Teach me to stop winning arguments and to keep weeping. Keep my love free of blackmail. And when it happens — for it will happen — let me be as ready as you were, who saw your son baptised at last and then had nothing left to ask for but to go home. Amen.
Pass it on
When this prayer is prayed
For a child who has left the faith, and for the parent who has run out of arguments — which is usually the moment the prayer begins to work. Monica prayed for Augustine for seventeen years; he became a bishop and a Doctor of the Church. He was baptised at Easter in 387 and she died that autumn at Ostia, on the way back, having told him she no longer had any reason to stay.