|
Books by St. Augusttine
The City of God
/
The Confessions
* * * *
*
Books by Rose Ure Mezu
Women
in Chains: Abandonment in Love Relationships in the
Fiction of Selected West African Writers (1994)
/
Songs of the Hearth
(1993) /
Homage to My People
(2004) /
A History of Africana Women's Literature (2004)
Black
Nationalists: Reconsidering Du Bois, Garvey, Booker T. &
Nkrumah (1999)
Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works
(2006)
*
* * * *
Of St. Augustine the
African Restless Heart and Search for Peace
St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.) – Feast Day -
August 28
By Dr. Rose Ure
Mezu
|
O Catholic Church, true mother of
Christians, you are right in teaching that
God should be adored with an entirely chaste
and pure heart. You unite all brothers and
sisters to one another in a bond of religion
that is stronger and closer than ties of
blood.—St. Augustine
The great heights reached by men and kept,
was not achieved by sudden flight; they
while the others slept toiled upwards in the
night—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in “The Ladder
of St. Augustine” |
Every year, I look forward to
August 27, and 28 when the feast days of St. Monica and
St. Augustine – mother and son – are celebrated
respectively. For me, these two Africans make a
wonderful team and family role models: the mother who
converted her erring, rebellious and immoral son, and
the son, who made his mother a saint: While dying, she
said to Augustine, “One thing only do I ask of you, that
you remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you
may be." Thenceforth, Monica’s name enters into the
lectionary of saints remembered on God’s altars during
daily mass. Another mother-son team is St. Helena and
Emperor Constantine. Helena was said to have gone to
Jerusalem and discovered the true Cross on which Jesus
Christ was crucified. She converted her son, who on
winning a definitive victory with the Cross as emblem,
made Christianity the Imperial state religion. And thus,
Christendom came into existence.
As I say always to modern youth,
Augustine, born November 13, 354 in Tagaste (present-day
Algeria in North Africa), is the ideal role model for
the very hip and wild, very restless and rebellious,
very indolent and loose-living youth of every age.
Descended from a Berber lineage, he was the playboy of
his period. Name whatever is socially dysfunctional, he
had done it, except murder. Growing up, Augustine
belonged to a street gang that kept neighbors sleepless,
wreaked mayhem on neighborhood properties, throwing
stones, stealing fruits – pears – not out of necessity
but for sheer wantonness to commit an illicit and
criminal act, and their nightly carousing centuries
later become eerily similar to the actions of the
youthful Francis of Assisi, just as Francis’s conversion
and love for God will be equally as epochal as
Augustine’s. As a more moral adult, Augustine would
come to realize that freedom to do whatever one wishes
is no freedom at all. Augustine’s bad examples and
morals caused his mother Monica to temporarily chase him
away from the house to safeguard the younger children –
Navigius and a girl, Perpetua, who will later be the
head of a Convent of nuns. She would bring him back
following a dream that assured her Augustine would
convert to become a great Christian.
Raised a Christian, Augustine would
grow up to join every ideological group but his mother’s
Christian community. Today, he could be called a
Cafeteria believer of new-fangled ideas. For nine years,
Augustine was the star devotee of the Manichean religion
with its dualism of light (that dwelt in peace), and
darkness that embodies constant conflict within itself.
The most striking principle of
Manichaean doctrine is its
dualism. Mani, the founder postulated
two natures that existed from the beginning: light and
darkness.
|
The
realm of light lived in peace, while the
realm of darkness was in constant conflict
with itself. The universe is the temporary
result of an attack from the realm of
darkness on the realm of light, and was
created by the Living Spirit, an emanation
of the light realm, out of the mixture of
light and darkness
Augustine
of Hippo). |
A key belief in
Manichaeism is that there is no omnipotent good power.
What this claim does is to address a theoretical part of
the
problem of evil by denying the infinite perfection
of God, postulating the equality of the binary concepts
of good and evil—a direct contradiction of the Christian
doctrine of the omnipotence and perfection of God. For
the Manicheans,
|
The
human person is seen as a battleground for
these powers: the good part is the
soul (which is composed of
light) and the bad part is the
body (composed of dark
earth). The soul defines the person and
is incorruptible, but the soul is under the
domination of a foreign power, which
addressed the practical part of The Problem
of Evil. Humans are said to be able to be
saved from this power (matter) if they come
to know who they are and identify themselves
with their soul (Augustine
of Hippo). |
That human
salvation rests only in human hands is a denial of
the existence of God. While in Milan and then Rome
where he set up a school of Rhetoric, Augustine
proceeded to promote the Manichean belief system.
But to counter her son’s destructive spiritual
self-entrapment, Monica’s sole recourse was to
Bishop Ambrose of Milan. Eventually, the hypocrisy
of the Manichean leadership and the shallowness of
their philosophies cost them the membership of the
intellectually restless and dynamic Augustine.
Augustine
approached the concupiscence of the flesh with
matchless zeal. At sixteen, Augustine moved to
Carthage where he was plagued by what he would later
term “wretched sin.” In the most vivid terms,
Augustine describes his struggles with lustful
desires:
|
There seethed all around
me a cauldron of lawless loves. I loved not
yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a
deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting
not. I sought what I might love, in love
with loving, and I hated safety. . . . To
love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to
me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the
person I loved. I defiled, therefore, the
spring of friendship with the filth of
concupiscence, and I beclouded its
brightness with the hell of lustfulness
(my emphasis). |
Augustine already had a child out
of wedlock by age eighteen. Later, he allowed his
mother to arrange marriage to a society woman of his own
class, and abandoned his concubine of many years.
Because he had to wait two years for his fiancée to come
of age, the ever lustful Augustine took up with another
woman:
|
Continual effort was made to have me
married. I wooed, I was promised, chiefly
through my mother's pains . . . and a
maiden asked in marriage, two years under
the fit age; and, as pleasing, was waited
for. (The Confessions 5: 13) |
In fact,
Augustine believed it was impossible to live even
for a day without a woman. He is the man who longed
to change but kept procrastinating, "Lord, Grant me
chastity and continence, but not yet - [da mihi
castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo”
(Confessions, viii. vii: 17). But Augustine had a
lot to learn. His struggle against fleshly lust
would be a long drawn out effort. Through it all,
Monica kept at her son. In Chapter Two of The
Confessions, Augustine acknowledges:
|
For she [my mother]
wished, and I remember in private with great
anxiety warned me, "not to commit
fornication; but especially never to defile
another man's wife." These seemed to me
womanish advices, which I should blush to
obey. But they were Thine, and I knew it not
. . . and ran headlong with such blindness,
that amongst my equals I was ashamed of a
less shamelessness, when I heard them boast
of their flagitiousness, yea, and the more
boasting, the more they were degraded: and I
took pleasure, not only in the pleasure of
the deed, but in the praise. . . . Behold
with what companions I walked the streets of
Babylon, and wallowed in the mire thereof,
as if in a bed of spices and precious
ointments. |
His mother’s
pursuit of her wayward son and prayerful campaign
for Augustine’s conversion were unrelenting. She
had already elicited the support of St. Ambrose, by
popular acclamation made Bishop of Milan, who is a
more experienced rhetorician than Augustine and whom
Augustine admired and sought to emulate. Ambrose’s
response to Monica with regard to her constant
anguish over her son’s behaviors is memorable,
“Cease from worrying me, Woman. It is not possible
that the son of so many tears / prayers can ever be
lost.” All that the poor mother really desired was
for Augustine to straighten his lifestyle, marry
conventionally and live a good Christian life. It
speaks to the power of the persevering prayers of a
mother that Monica’s dearest wish would soon come
true.
At last, by
chance, while in a garden in Milan, Augustine
overhears a children's song. "Tolle, lege," the song
urged, "Take up and
read" (Confessions, Book VIII, Chapter 12).
Augustine picked up the Bible and found a passage
from
Saint Paul's epistle to the
Romans that addresses his greatest flaw -- lust:
|
Not in rioting and
drunkenness, not in chambering and
wantonness, not in strife and envying but
put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no
provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts
thereof (Epistle
to the Romans 13:13). |
The positive
result of Monica’s tears and prayers went beyond her
wildest dreams. In 386 A.D., Augustine at Thirty-two
years, converted to Christianity, renounced
immorality completely, embraced chastity even though
this would remain a lifetime struggle, and being
celibate meant that he gave up ideas about marriage
completely. On Easter Vigil of 387 A.D., along with
his son Adeodatus (a name which, according to J.
Fersuson and Garry Wills, is a Latinization of the
Berber name Iatanbaal (Given by God), Augustine
was baptized by Bishop Ambrose of Milan. His mother
Monica lived to see him baptized and ordained
priest. She fell sick and died in Ostia, near Rome
in 387 A.D. on her way back to Africa. In 388 A.D.,
he would return to his native town, Tagaste.
Augustine sold
his inheritance, giving the proceeds to the poor,
keeping only the family house which he converted
into a monastery, bringing along his friends and his
son. Just as he with his charisma and great
leadership skills had misled so many of his friends
into popular heresies, he rallied his friends and
devotees together into the service of his newfound
Love – the God of grace. His mistress of fifteen
years also checked herself into a convent and died
there. Augustine’s son did not live long.
Augustine now without family lived to become the
Bishop of Hippo. Shedding like an old garment,
previous desires and seductions, Augustine remained
utterly satisfied with possessing the Lord to whom
he confesses:
|
For
thou convertedst me unto Thyself, so that I
sought neither wife, nor any hope of this
world, standing in that rule of faith in the
same way that you had revealed me to her [my
mother] so many years before.. . . And Thou
didst convert her mourning into joy, much
more plentiful than she had desired, and in
a much more precious and purer way than she
erst required, by having grandchildren of my
body. (The Confessiones 8 12: 30). |
He had established
Augustinian monastic rules, and spent the rest of his
Christian lifetime fighting Manichean doctrine and other
heresies. Even during his difficult youth, he had
remained a brilliant student and scholar. Influenced by
Horace’s Dialogues, Plotinus, Platonism and
Neo-Platonism, he put his formidable intellectual and
literary abilities to the service of the Church against
which he had fought in his misguided youth. He in turn
as an old Bishop was engaged in a lengthy controversy
with a younger and more resilient Bishop Julian, an
associate Pelagius, a preacher who believed that rather
than grace, one can by virtue and ascetic living alone
find salvation. Invoking papal authority, Augustine’s
teaching on grace prevailed. But by this time,
barbarians from Germany, crossing Roman Gaul and Spain
and entered Africa were besieging his city, Hippo. He
prayed that the city not fall while he lived. God
granted him his wish for Hippo was captured after
Augustine’s death on August 28, 430.A.D. at the age of
seventy-six.
For the ability to
clean up his act, and turn his life around, St.
Augustine has no compeer. The great Augustinian lesson
for our pleasure-loving society, especially to young
people, is that anyone can decide to come out of any
addiction, without recourse to expensive therapy.
Augustine went deep within his being to summon up a
trinity that could help him overcome his addictions –
the trinity of self-knowledge: “I Am, and Know, and
Will: I Am Knowing and Willing: and I Know myself to Be,
and to Will: and I Will to Be, and to Know” (The
Confessions 13: 12). Augustine demonstrates adequately
that all that is needed is the Will to Act, to Change
and to Transcend self-indulging proclivities. And thus,
readers truly identify with Augustine’s heartfelt prayer
for strength:
|
God, oh
Lord, grant me the power to overcome sin.
For this is what you gave to us when you
granted us free choice of will. If I choose
wrongly, then I shall be justly punished for
it. Is that not true, my Lord, of whom I
indebted for my temporal existence? Thank
you, Lord, for granting me the power to will
my self not to sin (Free Choice of the
Will, Book One, my emphasis) |
Arising from
lustfulness, Rape becomes one of the most striking
examples of social problems tackled by Augustine
which must resonate with 21st Century communities.
Augustine makes a distinction between the sexual act
itself, and the emotions that naturally accompany
it. Rape victims should feel no guilt, Augustine
believes, because the evil is not in them, but in
the perpetrators. Augustine understood the attendant
psychological trauma that rape victims can
experience. To the pious virgins raped when Rome was
sacked following the disintegration of the Roman
Empire, Augustine writes, "Truth, another's lust
cannot pollute thee." Chastity is "a virtue of the
mind, and is not lost by rape, but is lost only by
the intention of sin, even if unperformed." As has
been stated earlier, Augustine's sexual experiences
impelled him to consider lust to be one of the most
grievous sins, and a serious obstacle to the
virtuous life, capable of wreaking havoc on innocent
people.
St. Augustine’s
achievements were unprecedented for his age, and
perhaps for all time. Winning the highest academic
prize for Rhetoric by age Thirty – 384 A.D. - he
became a familiar favorite at the Imperial court,
but tension and dissatisfaction were setting in. One
day, as he rode in his carriage to deliver a grand
speech before the emperor, he saw a wretched beggar
and envied the beggar his unencumbered existence. It
is right that we should wonder how many academics of
today who, able to establish their own schools, to
achieve the distinction of being an Imperial poet
laureate and speak, say before the Emperor of the
great Roman Empire – today’s equivalent of the
President of the United States of America - would
have the courage and moral strength to relinquish so
much worldly honor and retire penniless into a
monastery. But Augustine was soon to make an
indelible mark in another direction. At a time when
Christians were simple, non-intellectual men, afraid
of engaging great pagan philosophers in debates,
Augustine‘s ideas became the basis for establishing
an enduring structure of Christian Church as we know
it today.
My 2005 essay,
“Pope John Paul II: A Life with a Mission, A Mission
of Grace and Moral Strength” had earlier stated the
above ideas:
|
And after all, at an age
when Christians lacked intellectuals amongst
them, the great St. Augustine of Hippo
(Algeria), son of St. Monica was the
earliest philosopher / theologian to employ
his stupendous intellectual gifts of
knowledge of Greek and Roman literatures and
philosophies to re-interpret the teachings
of Christ, the Epistles and the Old
Testament, thus welding together the old and
the new in honor of the Christ (Pope
John Paul II). |
St. Augustine
stood astride the last days of the Roman Empire and
the entry of Western Europe into the medieval age,
compiling all the motifs of Latin-rite Christianity
from Tertullian to Ambrose. He re-Christianized
Greco-Roman philosophies and literatures, revisiting
them in the light of the Holy Scriptures and thus,
became an apologist for the Catholic Christian
Church –
The City of God (De civitate Dei),
The Confessions
(The Confessiones, 397 A.D.). He wrote more
than a hundred titles, numerous sermons,
interpreting Holy Scriptures as they touched and
moved his heart, soul and mind.
Augustine’s The
Confessions is reputedly more than the first classic
Western autobiography. It denotes a deliberate and
conscious crafting of the memoir of a life in which
Augustine, selected and highlighted crucial
incidents and events of his life, and in his
self-analytical, lyrical and romantic style,
re-examines these episodes applying his theology of
Grace so as to celebrate the mysterious actions of
God's boundless grace. His Confessions confess the
many stages of his belief in God, of his sins and
his redemption. Augustine can truly be styled the
father of Psychology and Psychoanalysis.
Throughout the
middle Age, the influence of St. Augustine was
powerful and pervasive in medieval religious
thoughts. He explained infant baptism, good versus
evil, the doctrine of original sin, and the doctrine
of Predestination is attributed to him. In France,
this doctrine would later lead to Jansenism and a
schism in the Church. Augustine sought to understand
the mystery of the Holy Trinity, but at last had to
humbly accept the inefficacy of the intellect
viz-a-viz apprehending the mystery of God’s Triune
existence and the crucial role of Faith in human
salvation history (Seek not the things that are too
sublime for you, and search not into things beyond
thy ability Sirach 3: 22).
And so, he
queries humbly, “Which of us can comprehend the
Almighty Trinity? and yet which speaks not of It, if
indeed it be It? Rare is the soul, which while it
speaks of It, knows what it speaks of” (The
Confessions 13: 11). Those Biblical descriptions of
a person of intellect seeking to know Truth, but
infused with so much grace that s/he becomes
obedient to God can be applied to Augustine: And who
shall know thy thought, except You give wisdom, and
send your Holy Spirit from above (Wisdom 9: 18).
While Augustine
could not fully apprehend with human intellectual
knowledge (Logos) the mystery of the Holy Trinity,
he speaks of another trinity which he can understand
because it is within him: “To Be, to Know, and to
Will.” (The Confessions 13: 12). At the end,
Augustine, the radical neo-Platonist posits that
human odyssey is nothing but a journey in search of
God, who is the sum total of the highest good “most
excellent and most good,” greatest beauty “radiant
and resplendent,” deepest wisdom and purest Love.
Augustine exclaims in wonder, “I sought for You
outside while all the time you were within me.”
Romancing God, Augustine regrets spurning God’s love
for so long, “Late have I loved Thee, O, Beauty, so
Ancient and yet so New!” Seeking God in created
things did not satisfy this neo-Platonist lover, and
he humbly confesses the attainment of the real goal
of his search:
|
You have made us for Yourself, O Lord,
and our hearts are restless until they rest
in You. (The Confessions 1) |
 |
Frustrated humanity, seeking after
various pleasures should remember the odyssey of
Augustine. While reading
The City of God, and especially
The Confessions,
along with a spell-binding fictional
biography of St. Augustine by Louis de Wohl
titled
The Restless Flame (1997), I, a
indigenous African with good knowledge of
traditional African religious values,
eagerly sought to find explanation for why
this African who while in Milan and Rome
felt homesick for the tropical, sun-kissed
land of his birth, felt the stings of
discrimination for his brown skin, and did
not at all identify with Europeans, why it
is that Augustine would become the central
figure to follow the Jew, Paul of Tarsus in
firmly establishing the temporal structure
of the Christian faith. The explanation
would be found in the abundance of
theological proofs, metaphysical intuition,
the passion, the fervor of Augustine’s
spiritual ascents which enclothe his
emphasis on Faith and Grace. |
For St. Augustine,
God is a concept to be apprehended only by God’s
unmerited grace and faith: God is a non-material Being -
Supreme and Sovereign, is beyond color, beyond race,
beyond ethnic or class prejudices, and only speaks of
infinity of virtues and values. Thus, just as St.
Augustine the African recognized in St. Ambrose an
embodiment of the dignity of Christian learning, the
role of Faith and Grace in human salvation history, and
the majesty of the authority of the Christian
Scriptures, I would also always take comfort in these
stalwart converts to Catholicism: St. Paul of Tarsus,
St. Augustine, Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman
(1801-1890;
Apologia Pro Vita Sua– 1864), the great
intellectual Doctor and convert from Anglicanism; in St
(Sir) Thomas Moore (1478-1535), Humanist, lawyer,
writer, philosopher Lord Chancellor for Henry VIII’s
England, author of
Utopia (1516), who willingly went to his
death rather than compromise his faith, as well as in
these women saints of formidable intellect and robust,
indomitable faith such as Teresa of Avila and
philosopher intellectual Edith Stein (canonized in 1987
and renamed St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), and
recently in John Paul II, the Great (Pope
John Paul II).
If these remarkable
people can reconcile their great learning with Faith in
Christ, if they can learn to be humble, subsume their
formidable talents into accepting the mystery of Grace
and Faith in human redemption, how much less would I
protest, I of lesser intellectual fiber.
And so, for me, St.
Augustine’s
The Confessions
becomes the allegory of Everyman and humanity’s a return
to a life of grace, search for Truth. For all ages,
Augustine says to created humans that True happiness
does not lie in material possessions, nor in the
pleasures and seductions of sex, but that there is a
deeper, richer dimension to human existence, for only in
God can the restless heart find true peace. In the
present culture of unbridled decadence and hedonism,
St. Augustine makes it possible for us to know that we
can change our lifestyle, no matter how difficult our
circumstance, no matter how enticing and beckoning our
pleasures. He indeed makes it manly to be passionate
about loving God for his writing style is replete with
so much lyricism and outpourings of sentiments. He makes
it okay to know we can turn from evil no matter how
deeply entrenched we are, and never go back to its
seductions.
Thus, every reader
can truly find something to identify with in reading the
writings of St. Augustine. For making the God of Grace
and God’s sovereign grace the central themes of all his
writings, St. Augustine, this multi-faceted African
Genius - spell-binding speaker, Professor of Rhetoric
and literature, philosopher and theologian, fascinating
poet, and mystic, who left a large body of work of
enormous range and incredible depth - has been aptly
styled Doctor Gratiae – Doctor of Grace by the Roman
Catholic Church.
Like St. Paul of
Tarsus, Augustine remains a central figure in Christian
theology and in the history of Western philosophical
thoughts. And praise goes to the God of Grace who would
always go outside the saved fold and bestow His
redemptive grace on people who can be considered wicked,
demonic and undeserving. This God of mercy is able to
recognize the vigor, passionate zeal and determination
of these errant souls who devoted so much of their
talent to the wrong cause, and conscript them, cause
them to re-channel the same energy and zeal to work for
the Right Cause. In the process, both St. Paul and St.
Augustine suffered much more existential pain than they
had inflicted on God’s people. They have become
providential tools to advance God’s inscrutable designs.
And to think that all of Augustine’s sanctity and
immortality came to be because of a mother’s deep,
energetic and unflagging love for her son!
* * *
* *
 |
Monica
did not leave any memoirs or a body of
writing, but her son Augustine in
The Confessions
made the cause for her canonization.
Married to Patricius, a pagan Roman
official, Monica, born in 322 A.D., was
descended from the Berber – indigenous
natives of the present Maghreb region of
North Africa. Monica is said to be a Berber
name derived from the Libyan deity Mon
worshipped in the neighboring town of
Thibilis.
This mother, undaunted by
difficulties and failures, pursued her
oldest, very a gifted child who had a
disorderly nature and who engaged in riotous
behavior. That the mother did not give up
on Augustine has made Monica to become for
all ages the super mum par excellence. It
took her years of tears, prayers of
intercession, chasing Augustine from town to
town, meddling in his affairs, arranging
marriage for him, and invoking the aid of
the saintly intellectual Bishop Ambrose of
Milan to finish her job of saving her son.
(photo
left) "St Augustine and Monica" (1846), by
Ary
Scheffer |
One
appreciates how spectacularly independent Monica must
have been in that age to travel from Africa to Carthage,
to Milan, To Rome and back again in pursuit of her son.
In Milan, she would rent a villa and set up house,
entertain and get to know the people that matter to her
son. For her reward, Monica had the gift of seeing
Augustine baptized; and rather than the conventional
Christian marriage that she hoped for, she got the
unexpected bonus of seeing him put his affairs in order,
take firm charge of his destiny, set his heart and soul
towards love and service for God as priest and monk.
.
In 387, Monica became mortally sick in Ostia, outside
Rome, on her way back to Tagaste, Algeria. Her son
queried:” why die here? I thought you want to be buried
beside your husband in Africa?” Monica’s humorous
answer demonstrates her heightened spiritual
advancement: "Lay this body anywhere, and take no
trouble over it. I know that on the last day, God will
know where to pick up my body to reunite it with my
soul.” Having completed her mission, Monica’s time was
up. And she had seen with her own eyes the proof that
implicit Trust in God yields unprecedented and boundless
benefits.
My mother Bessie
Chiege Iwuji Okeke (Chiege, Woman of Splendor)
always spoke out her affinity with Monica. With an only
son, who was considered rascally and unruly, my mother
was inspired and encouraged by St. Monica’s example of
prayer, tears, exhortation and perseverance. Her son, my
brother, as an adolescent was a star soccer goal keeper
who came and went as he fancied. Rather than
concentrate on book knowledge which for Nigeria of the
period was the key to success in a colonial world, he
played football at all times. Schools were eager to
have him on their team. Apparently, the youthful
Augustine encountered the same censure from his parents
for playing the same sport—football:
|
our sole delight was
play; and for this we were punished by those
who yet themselves were doing the like. But
elder folks' idleness is called "business";
that of boys, being really the same, is
punished by those elders; and none
commiserates either boys or men. For will
any of sound discretion approve of my being
beaten as a boy, because, by playing a ball,
I made less progress in studies? (The
Confessions 1: 15, my emphasis). |
Some radiance
of his fame fell on me also for senior girls courted
me at school as they vied to befriend him. In an
effort to make him switch from playing ball to books
homework, my Father played the heavy but my mum took
the softer, more prayerful Monican approach.
Perhaps, because he did not exactly have the
multi-dimensional rascality of Augustine, my only
brother turned out tolerably through my mother’s
prayers. And so, through my mother, I have always
loved Monica, the strong, independent woman, the
super Christian mother, the compassionate wife.
Monica gives hope to all women with problem
children. She teaches mothers how not to despair,
but to go on saying and doing the right things
regardless of temporary setbacks, or unpopularity
with their children. I always cherished the
verbalized picture of Monica and Augustine together
in a garden at last discoursing on God. How happy
this must have made her!:
|
And so the two of us, all
alone, were enjoying a very pleasant
conversation, "forgetting the past and
pushing on to what is ahead.” We were asking
one another in the presence of the Truth—for
you are the Truth—what it would be like to
share the eternal life enjoyed by the
saints, which "eye has not seen, nor ear
heard, which has not even entered into the
heart of man." We desired with all our
hearts to drink from the streams of your
heavenly fountain, the fountain of life.
|
Equally, St. Monica
teaches wives how to live with, and manage abusive
husbands; her example says that one can cultivate
patience and prudence, hold back the cutting word when
tempers are heated and an explosion imminent;
reprimanding later might just do the trick. Patricius
was also unfaithful to Monica, but she had compassion
and must have forgiven him his weakness. Fellow women
would ask her how she did it, how she managed to live
with this volatile, quarrelsome husband who contended in
public with practically everyone. Her response was that
she let anger cool off, never responding at the heat of
the moment but later on, she would bring up issues that
needed to be discussed when her husband would be in a
less bellicose mood.
Indeed, two people
can not be crazy at the same time. A beloved daughter
had used the same means to hold her own marriage
together. In these days of easy divorces, hypocrisy and
quick judgment on moral failings, what a lesson on the
qualities of love, forgiveness, compassion and prudence
needed to keep a family together in peace and love.
For radical
feminism and issues in Women / family Studies, Monica’s
inclination towards temperance and loving forbearance
might read like subservience, passivity and suffering in
silence, yet again, it depends on one’s objectives.
Every woman knows what she wants out of a marriage –
equality in the capacity to do battle or, a shrewdly
intelligent approach to a difficult situation? Monica
appreciated that her husband co-operated with her, made
personal sacrifices to help educate their gifted son,
Augustine. For Monica, it was domestic peace, love and
stability of home-life for her children that mattered.
In the last analysis, Feminism is all about intelligent
personal choices. She chose to live peacefully with her
irascible husband, prudently got her way eventually, and
helped to encourage him towards his own redemption –
which was her ultimate goal. Through her prayers, her
pagan husband converted to Catholicism just before he
died in 371 A.D. From a Latin-rite Catholic viewpoint,
Monica, this woman of strength and spiritual splendor,
demonstrates so well the efficacy of Prayers of
Intercession.
Regarding her son,
the great Augustine, Monica’s achievements were
spectacular and Augustine testifies to his mother’s
phenomenal accomplishments. Many decades after her
death, he still loved his mother and mourned for her:
|
My mother said,
"Son, as far as I am concerned, nothing in this life now
gives me any pleasure. I do not know why I am still
here, since I have no further hopes in this world. I did
have one reason for wanting to live a little longer: to
see you become a Catholic Christian before I died. God
has lavished his gifts on me in that respect, for I know
that you have even renounced earthly happiness to be his
servant. So what am I doing here?" |
By writing her
into sainthood, he fulfills her dying wish: “One thing
only do I ask of you, that you remember me at the altar
of the Lord wherever you may be." Monica made her son
Christ’s brainy warrior and Augustine’s pen and
testimony keep the mother remembered for ever for
Monica’s relics can be found in a chapel to the left
side of the high altar in the Church of St. Augustine in
Rome. Thus, Monica, positively a classic case of “‘If
Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy’ - Mother knows
best” becomes a woman “for all seasons.” What a
marvelous example of how a family should live
co-operatively in love in difficult times such as our
days.
Works Cited:
Confessions of St. Augustine.
Translated. John K. Ryan. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960.
“Augustine of Hippo.”
Wikipedia.
de Wohl, Louis.
The
Restless Flame: A Novel about St. Augustine. N.Y:
J.B.Lippincott, 1971.
The Holy Bible. Douay Rheims
American Version, 1899.
BibleGateway
Mezu, Rose Ure. “Chiege,
Woman of Splendor." In ChickenBones: A Journal. Web
Host: Rudy Lewis. (In Songs of the Hearth. MD: Black
Academy Press, 1993.)
Mezu, Rose Ure. “Pope John Paul II:
A Life with a Mission, A Mission of Grace and Moral
Strength.” In ChickenBones: A Journal. Web
Host: Rudy Lewis.
Tuesday, August
28, 2007
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|
The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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