By Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine, Feb. 1, 2025
Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. …
Editor’s Note: This is the fourteenth in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.
You did not choose me, but I chose you…” (John 15:16)
Not only does the example of St. Monica illustrate the power of prayer but it reaches into the very meaning of motherhood as well.
Despite all the steps people will insist on taking to create union with God, clearing away whole lumberyards of spiritual debris along the way, intimacy with God has never really been about us to begin with. Having a relationship with God is not something we do but rather Someone we receive. And it is He who takes the initiative. Even our prayers are prompted by Another. That is, when we do pray. Too often our prayer life is rather like those “enchanted cigarettes,” of which the writer Balzac speaks—that is, the books we hope someday to publish but never actually get around to writing.
In other words, it’s not as if our prayers were like Shakespeare’s “bootless cries to heaven,” heartfelt but never answered; it’s that our cries are never sent at all. Or that our lament, as Hopkins writes, “Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.” It’s that we’re not sending any letters at all….
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