Holy Tenacity
Holy Tenacity
It helps to have two patron saints. Any local church can use all the prayer they can get! So we get to have two patronal feasts on a Sunday, Saint Monica’s on May 4th, and Saint James the Great, Son of Zebedee, on July 25th. At the same time, Monica’s feast falls within Eastertide. So, this Sunday at St. Monica and St. James is a blended Sunday, with both collects and half our scriptures (Old Testament and psalm) from St. Monica, and half (Epistle and Gospel) from 5th Easter. Far too often, people directly quote Jesus describing himself as the “Way” to our Creator and Parent, and miss that’s Jesus isn’t calling himself the final destination, but as the journey there. So, Monica at the end of her physical life far from her final destination in this world trusted that Jesus was with her wherever she was in her and Jesus’ journey together.
Monica may well have been the most tenacious and patient mother in all Christendom. She followed her talented son from their home on the North African coast (modern day Algeria) to Italy, where she made her life’s work, convincing her son to be baptized. When Augustine said things like, “Lord give me continence but not yet,” Monica’s patience was tried. But by her patience and prayer, the mentoring of Saint Ambrose the Bishop of Milan, and the groaning Spirit within restless Augustine himself, he was finally baptized. That combination of faithful tenacity and patience made Monica a saint, before her son went on to become one of the most famous saints in the Church, which is why we know of Monica’s sanctity.
After his baptism, Monica, Augustine and her other son began their journey from Milan to Rome, and were preparing to sail from the port of Ostia back to North Africa, when Monica fell ill. Here's the rest of her story from Lesser Feasts and Fasts: Augustine writes, “One day during her illness she had a fainting spell and lost consciousness for a short time. We hurried to her bedside, but she soon regained consciousness and looked up at my brother and me as we stood beside her. With a puzzled look, she asked, ‘Where was I?’ Then, watching us closely as we stood there speechless with grief, she said, ‘You will bury your mother here,’ far from her destination and homeland.
“Augustine’s brother expressed sorrow, for her sake, that she would die so far from her own country. She said to the two brothers, ‘It does not matter where you bury my body. Do not let that worry you. All I ask of you is that, wherever you may be, you should remember me at the altar of the Lord.’ To the question of whether she was afraid at the thought of leaving her body in an alien land, she replied, ‘Nothing is far from God, and I need have no fear that he will not know where to find me, when he comes to raise me to life at the end of the world.’” Looking out over the Mediterranean between her and her homeland, thankful for her restless son finally finding the rest of God, Monica knew that Jesus had walked with her on their “Way” together, and that Jesus would carry her the rest of the way.
Monica was a child of Africa. So, what gracious providence it was that her story would come to be handed down in Christian tradition to those children of Africa whose way was so wrongly detoured, “treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.” Monica’s faithful tenacity and patience made her an ideal patron of the fourth African American Episcopal church in the Diocese of Washington. All we Americans, and Episcopalians, need her need her faith, her tenacity, her patience, and above all, her prayers for conversion, the changing of hearts and minds from defensiveness and denial to the pursuit of justice, which according to Cornel West, is simply “what love looks like in public.”
So may our mother patron’s prayers enlighten us and strengthen us to contribute to that public love which is justice, that we might yet tread our way “Out from the gloomy past / Til now we stand at last / Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.”
May 03, 2026
5th Sunday of Easter and Feast of St. Monica
The Rev. David Kendrick