Praying for a Wayward Child: The Complete Guide Through Saint Monica's Seventeen Years of Tears
For the Mothers Who Weep at Midnight • A Practical Guide to Long-Haul Intercession
Praying for a Wayward Child: The Complete Guide Through Saint Monica's Seventeen Years of Tears
She watched her brilliant son fall into heresy, immorality, and a life that seemed to promise only ruin. She prayed for him every single day for seventeen years. This is her pattern of prayer, broken down so you can use it tonight, for the one you love who has not yet come home.
Saint Monica — At a Glance
- Lived
- c. 331 – 387 • Born in Thagaste, North Africa (modern Algeria)
- Patron Of
- Mothers • Wives in difficult marriages • Those praying for a loved one's conversion
- Her Husband
- Patricius, a pagan Roman official • Baptized shortly before his death after 30 years of her prayer
- Her Son
- Augustine of Hippo, later one of the great theologians of the Church
- The Long Wait
- Approximately 17 years of prayer for Augustine's conversion
- The Famous Words
- “The son of so many tears could not perish.” — a bishop's promise to Monica
- The Turning Point
- Augustine's conversion in a garden in Milan, AD 386, at age 32
- Her Death
- Ostia, Italy, AD 387, age 56, shortly after seeing the answer to her prayer
- Feast Day
- August 27 (Western) • commemorated in the Eastern tradition as well
- Source
- Saint Augustine's own account in his Confessions
The Patron Saint of Tears
If you have prayed for years and the prayers seem not to have been answered, if you have watched a child wander away from God, or a marriage fall into ruin, or someone you love give themselves over to a life you know will destroy them, you are not alone, and there is a woman in heaven who knows exactly what you are carrying.
Saint Monica is the patron saint of mothers, of wives in difficult marriages, and most especially of those who pray for the conversion of a loved one for years without seeing the answer. She is called the patron saint of tears, because she shed so many of them, and the patron saint of persistence, because she would not stop, no matter how long it took. Her son, Augustine, would become one of the greatest teachers in Christian history. But that came only after seventeen years of his rebellion, his unbelief, his immoral living, and her ceaseless prayer. If you have been praying for less time than that, take heart. If you have been praying longer, take even greater heart. Monica's tears were not wasted, and neither are yours.
The world looks at a son who has rejected the faith, a husband who has walked away, a daughter caught in a destructive life, and sees only the wreckage. It tells the mother to move on. But heaven does not see what the world sees. Heaven sees the mother on her knees in the dark, and heaven hears every tear that falls. A bishop once told Monica, in a phrase that has comforted mothers for sixteen centuries, that the child of so many tears could not possibly be lost. That promise was not just for her. This article will walk you through her whole story, the exact pattern of how she prayed, why God let her wait so long, and how to pray as she prayed, tonight, for the one you love.
Part II
Her Story: Seventeen Years That Changed the Church
Before she was a saint, Monica was a girl growing up in a small town in North Africa, in what is now Algeria, born into a Christian family around the year 331. When she came of age, her family married her to Patricius, a Roman official with no faith of his own, a man with a hot temper who was, by every account that survives, a difficult husband. Monica learned, over years of patient suffering, that she would not change him by fighting him. She held her tongue when he raged and spoke to him gently when his moods cooled, and little by little something began to soften in him, though he did not yet know what was happening to him.
She bore him three children. The eldest, born in 354, was a brilliant boy named Augustine. She poured her faith into him from his cradle. But Augustine grew into the kind of young man who gives himself over entirely to ambition, vanity, and the pleasures of the body. He fathered a son out of wedlock. He embraced a strange counterfeit religion called Manicheism, which rejected the God of the Old Testament and reduced Christ to a symbol. He remained in this error for nine years, and when he tried to spread it at his mother's own table, she did something that astonished everyone, including herself. She threw him out of the house. She would not pretend that everything was fine when nothing was.
But she never stopped loving him, and she never stopped praying. She wept for him at night. She fasted for him. She sought out every bishop who might argue him out of his error, until one finally told her, gently, to stop pestering him and to let Augustine grow tired of his own foolishness in God's time. Seeing she was not consoled, he added the words that have rung in the hearts of praying mothers for sixteen hundred years: it was not possible that the son of so many tears should perish.
When Augustine, now a young academic, decided to sail for Rome without her, he lied to her to escape her prayers and slipped onto the ship while she begged God in a chapel by the shore. She followed him anyway, crossing the sea herself, then following him again to Milan, where the bishop, Saint Ambrose, became her spiritual father and repeated the same promise: the son of so many tears could not perish. Slowly, Augustine left the Manichees, drifted toward philosophy, and inched nearer the truth, though he could not yet let go of his old life. He prayed, famously, Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.
Then came the garden. Weeping under a fig tree, torn apart by his own divided heart, Augustine heard a child's voice chanting over a garden wall: take and read, take and read. He opened the letters of Saint Paul at random and read a single verse about putting on the Lord Jesus Christ. He read no further. A light of peace flooded his heart, and the chain that had bound him for seventeen years broke that day. He was thirty-two years old. He went in to tell his mother. She did not say I knew it. She simply praised God, with a joy too deep for any earthly satisfaction.
Augustine was baptized at the Easter Vigil of 387. Monica was there. On the journey home to Africa, mother and son stopped at Ostia, where, at a window overlooking a garden, they spoke together of eternity until their souls seemed, for a moment, to touch heaven itself. Five days later Monica fell ill. Within nine days she was dying. Asked whether she feared dying far from her homeland, she said that nothing was far from God, and that her sons should simply remember her at the altar wherever they were. She died at fifty-six, having lived to see the answer to the prayer of her life.
Part III
The Five-Part Pattern of Monica's Prayer
Augustine, in telling us his mother's story, left the Church something more than a biography. He left a pattern, a way of praying for a loved one across the long haul that you can begin using tonight.
She Prayed Daily, and She Prayed Always
Monica did not pray for Augustine in occasional bursts of intensity. She prayed every day, in the small constant ways that, over decades, become a wall of intercession around a soul. The water that wears away the stone does not strike it in great blows. It falls drop by drop, year after year. Build your prayer for your loved one into the texture of your ordinary day, so it becomes as habitual as breathing, and let it run on for as long as it must.
She Wept
Monica wept without shame, in public and in private, until her own son was embarrassed by it. The psalms tell us God puts our tears into a bottle and writes them in his book. There is nothing weak about a mother's tears before God. They are the body's own confession of how much the soul cares. If tears come when you pray, do not stop them. They are part of the prayer, and they are heard.
She Did Not Stop Loving
Through the heresy, the immorality, the lies, even the moment Augustine deliberately deceived her to escape her prayers, Monica never let her love sour into bitterness. She set real boundaries; she would not let him preach error at her table. But underneath the boundaries, the love kept burning. Keep your love soft even when softness is the harder thing, because that is the only heart from which a saving prayer can rise.
She Trusted the Bishop and the Church
Monica did not try to be a one-woman intercessor. She brought her grief to the Church, sought out bishops and priests, received the Holy Mysteries, and let the prayers of the whole Church join with hers. When you are praying for a loved one, take their name to your priest. Ask for prayers at the Liturgy. Let the communion of saints carry you and your loved one together. There is a strength in shared intercession that solitary prayer can never reach alone.
She Did Not Set the Terms
Monica begged God to convert Augustine, but she did not dictate the timetable or the form the answer would take. When her prayers seemed to fail completely, she simply followed him across the sea. To pray with persistence is not the same as to pray with control. The answer may come tomorrow, or in twenty years, or, as Monica's did, only at the very end. Your task is not to design the answer. Your task is to keep asking, and to trust the one who hears.
Part IV
Why God Lets Us Wait
The question every praying mother eventually asks is the hardest question in all of intercession: why is God taking so long? Scripture and the saints offer no full answer, but they offer glimpses that help us bear the wait without despairing of it.
Because the Soul Must Want It
God made human beings free, and he will not drag a soul into heaven by force. With some souls, willingness comes quickly. With others, the proud ones, the brilliant ones, the deeply wounded ones, it comes only after the running has finally exhausted them. Augustine had to run all the way to the bottom of his own pride before he could fall to his knees in that garden. The years were not wasted; they were the road by which he came to know the running could not save him.
Because the Praying Heart Must Be Purified
None of us begins this kind of prayer fully formed. We begin with mixed motives: love, yes, but also fear, embarrassment, the desire to control. The years of unanswered prayer burn these motives away, stripping intercession down to its purest form, the simple, naked longing for the other soul's salvation. By the end, Monica was no longer trying to manage Augustine. She was praying for his soul before God, simply and purely, every other agenda laid down.
Because the Answer Will Be Greater Than the Asking
Monica prayed for Augustine to be saved. She got, in the end, a son who became one of the greatest teachers in the history of the Church. The slowness of the answer was, in part, because God was preparing in his soul a depth that a quicker conversion would never have produced. We almost never know what God is preparing in the one we pray for. We see only what they are doing wrong. He sees what they will become.
Because the Wait Itself Is a Prayer
The years of faithful intercession, the tears, the love that refuses bitterness, the trust that refuses despair, all of this is itself a prayer, perhaps the deepest one a soul can offer. Monica's seventeen years were not empty waiting before the real prayer was answered. They were the prayer, mounting before God like incense the whole time. Your years of waiting are doing the same thing for the one you love. None of it is wasted.
Part V
Guarding the Heart Against Bitterness
There is a danger subtler than giving up. Most who love deeply do not give up; they keep praying long past the point where giving up would make more sense. The real danger is bitterness, the slow hardening of a heart that has loved and waited and been disappointed too many times. Love starts to curdle into resentment, and without quite noticing, we become people who still pray but no longer love.
This is the danger Monica avoided through seventeen years of provocation, and she kept the heart soft on purpose, because a bitter prayer is no prayer at all. The signs of bitterness are sneaky: telling the same story about your loved one with dark satisfaction rather than sorrow, looking almost hopefully for proof that you were right about them, hardening yourself and calling it self-protection. When you notice these signs, name them honestly before God rather than dressing them up as realism.
Then choose, as a daily discipline, the practice of tenderness. Pull out an old photograph and let your heart soften toward the child they were before all this. Speak their name to God with love, even if the love is a thin thread you can barely feel. There will be days when you cannot feel love for them at all. On those days, do not try to manufacture a feeling. Just keep the bare bones of the discipline: say their name to God, do not curse them in your heart, and wait quietly until the warmth returns, as it will. Love is not always a warm sensation. Sometimes it is simply not slamming the door of the heart shut.
Part VI
The Jesus Prayer for the Praying Mother
There is one prayer shorter than all the others and stronger than any of them, the prayer that has carried mothers and monks, kings and beggars, through fifteen centuries of Christian history. It is built to fit your breath, and you can pray it a thousand times a day without exhaustion.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
To pray it for someone else, simply change the ending: have mercy on him, a sinner; have mercy on her, a sinner. Or shorter still, when even those words are too many: Lord Jesus, have mercy. It needs no eloquence, no mental composition, only the breath in your lungs and the love in your heart. When you pray it for your loved one, you are praying everything at once, that the Lord would soften their heart, lift their blindness, draw them home, heal their wounds, and arrange the circumstances of their life toward repentance. All of it is contained in the single word mercy.
Begin small. Set aside one or two short times a day, perhaps on waking and before sleep, and pray it slowly, twenty or thirty times, for the one you love. Then weave it through the day itself. When their name comes up and the old grief stabs, breathe the prayer once. After a while you will find it praying itself in you, the steady undertone of your interior life, so that you are interceding for them almost constantly without ever feeling the weight of it. Many pray it with a knotted prayer rope, called a chotki or komboskini, simply as a physical anchor to keep the mind attentive. What matters is the prayer itself, and the small daily faithfulness of returning to it again and again.
O God of my fathers and mothers, the God of Monica and of all those who have wept for the children of their hearts, hear the prayer of this servant of yours, and do not despise the tears of a mother. Soften the heart of the one I love. Draw them back to you in your own time and in your own way. Let no harm come to them while they wander, and let every circumstance of their life become a road that leads them home. Through the intercession of Saint Monica, who waited seventeen years and did not stop, give me the patience to wait as long as I must, and the grace to keep loving without growing bitter. Amen.
A devotional reflection inspired by the Saint Monica tradition, not an official liturgical text.
Part VII
A Short Novena Prayer to Saint Monica
A novena is simply nine days of focused prayer, traditionally offered for an urgent need. To pray a novena to Saint Monica, choose a quiet moment each day for nine days, light a candle if you are able, and pray the short prayer above, asking her by name to join her intercession to yours. On each day, hold one part of her pattern in your heart: her daily faithfulness on the first days, her honest tears, her undimmed love, her trust in the Church, her patient refusal to dictate the answer. By the ninth day, you will have walked through the whole shape of her prayer and made it, in some small way, your own.
You do not need to feel a dramatic breakthrough by the ninth day. Monica's own novena, in a sense, lasted seventeen years. The point of the nine days is not to extract a quick answer from heaven. It is to root your own prayer more deeply in hers, so that whether the answer comes in nine days or in seventeen years, you are praying as she prayed: faithfully, honestly, without bitterness, and without giving up.
Part VIII
Go Deeper: The Complete Guide
Everything in this article is drawn from a single complete guide written for exactly this kind of long, hard prayer: Saint Monica: A Mother's Guide to Prayer, Intercession, and Hope. It carries Monica's full story, her complete pattern of prayer, and specific prayers for situations this article could only summarize: a child who has left the faith, a child caught in addiction, an adult child far from God, an estranged child, a child in a destructive relationship, a child hurting themselves, a child who has hurt you deeply, even a child you have lost to death. It also contains prayers for a spouse who does not believe, a spouse who has fallen into sin, a marriage in crisis, healing after betrayal, reconciliation after separation, and a difficult marriage you cannot leave.
The book also introduces other holy mothers who pray with you: the Mother of God herself, Saint Anne, Saint Helen, Saint Nonna, and Saint Emmelia, a whole cloud of mothers who suffered as you suffer. It closes with a complete forty-day novena to Saint Monica, a guide to building a daily mother's prayer rule, and a chapter on what to do when you cannot pray anymore. It is written for exactly the moment you are in right now.
Whether you have been praying for a year or for twenty, this guide was written to walk beside you, the way Monica's own example has walked beside praying mothers for sixteen centuries.
Frequently Asked Questions
Praying to Saint Monica — Questions & Answers
The God Who Heard Monica Is Hearing You.
You are not the first mother to weep at midnight for a child who will not come home. You are not the first wife to pray for years over a marriage that seems beyond repair. Monica walked this road for seventeen years, and the God who heard her tears is the same God hearing yours tonight. Your prayer is not wasted. Keep praying. Keep loving. Keep waiting, without bitterness, for as long as it takes.
For the complete guide, with prayers for every situation a mother or wife might bring to God, the full book is available now.
Get Saint Monica: A Mother's Guide on Amazon →