The Weeping Man in the Baptistery

On the night before Easter, 387 AD, a thirty-two-year-old professor named Augustine stepped into the baptismal pool at the cathedral in Milan. Bishop Ambrose stood waist-deep in the water, waiting.

For nearly two decades, Augustine had run from God — through the lecture halls of Carthage and Rome, through Manichaean philosophy, through a string of relationships that left him hollow. His mother, Monica, had wept and prayed for him for over thirty years, following him across the Mediterranean, refusing to give up.

Now, in the flickering candlelight of the Easter Vigil, Augustine descended into the cold water. Ambrose lowered him beneath the surface and raised him up again. Augustine later wrote that in that moment, all the anxiety of his former life simply melted away. The weight he had carried for years was gone.

Somewhere in the congregation, Monica wept — this time from joy.