In his Confessions,
a text that Angela loved
and taught a generation of students to love,
St. Augustine tells two different stories about grief.
In the fourth book, he writes of being a young man,
years before his conversion to Christianity,
and losing a childhood friend to death.
He writes movingly of his grief
as he experienced it at the time:
“I boiled with anger, sighed, wept,
and was at my wit’s end.
I found no calmness,
no capacity for deliberation.
I carried my lacerated and bloody soul
when it was unwilling to be carried by me.
I found no place
where I could put it down” (4.6.12).
But as movingly as he evokes this youthful grief,
he also looks back on his earlier self
with a critical eye.
He sees in his grief
a kind of theatrical self-involvement
that the young can be prone to:
his younger self was genuinely suffering,
but was also somewhat impressed
by the depth of his own suffering.
His older self can also see,
looking back at his younger self,
the fatal human error
of investing ourselves too deeply
in our worldly loves:
he writes, “in these things
there is no point of rest:
they lack permanence” (4.10.15).
For, as Augustine tells us repeatedly,
our only rest is to rest in God.
Were this Augustine’s last word on grief
we might think that it is
somehow unchristian to mourn.
We might think it is
unchristian to love anyone so deeply
that their death would leave us
with a torn and bloody soul.
But this is not his last word on grief.
In book nine of his Confessions
he writes of the death of his mother, Monica,
shortly after his conversion to Christianity,
a conversion for which Monica
had persistently prayed with many tears.
And Augustine’s words describing his grief
are strikingly similar to the words he uses
is speaking of the death of his youthful friend:
“my soul was wounded,
and my life as it were torn to pieces,
since my life and hers
had become a single thing” (9.12.30).
But, he goes on to say,
“I was reproaching the softness of my feelings
and was holding back
the torrent of sadness” (9.12.31).
Recently converted,
a sort of adolescent in the Christian faith,
Augustine finds his own grief shameful,
a sign of the power that love for passing things
still holds over him.
So he tries to hide it, even from God.
But he realizes that in denying his grief
he is also denying his love for his mother.
She had wept for him;
could he not in turn weep for her?
He says to God, “Now I let flow the tears
which I had held back….
My heart rested upon them,
and it reclined upon them
because it was your ears that were there” (9.12.33).
We come here to weep at Angela’s grave,
confident that God hears our grief
and knows the love from which it comes,
praying that God will, in time,
heal the grief so that only the love remains.
We come to weep not because we doubt
that Angela has found her rest in God,
but because we remain behind,
still pilgrims on the restless journey
that Angela has finished.
We come to weep because we will miss
the sight of her face and the sound of her voice,
which made the journey just a little bit easier.
We do not grieve as those without hope,
for we believe, as Angela believed,
that Christ has defeated death.
Still, our souls feel lacerated and bloody,
our lives feel torn to pieces.
So we come to weep,
even as we look forward to the day
when we will join Angela—
our daughter, sister, wife, mother, and friend—
in that city of God where every tear
will be wiped away,
for “there we shall rest and see,
see and love, love and praise” (Civ. Dei 22.30).
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