"If we do not obtain what we ask for, God will give us something better"
There is an experience that runs through all of us alike: that of having asked for something in real need and having received no answer. The unanswered prayer is, perhaps, the most widespread objection of our time. It arises from the disappointment of not feeling taken seriously.
The feast of Saint Augustine, on 28 August, offers a privileged occasion to return to that question from within a centuries-old tradition.
On 1 August 1875, in the instructions addressed to the religious gathered in Chapter, Saint Marie Eugénie drew precisely on the Bishop of Hippo to shed light on this difficulty:
"To this add what St. Augustine says: that if we do not obtain what we ask for, God will give us something better".
Instructions de Chapitre, 1 August 1875
The formulation is brief, but its scope is considerable. It does not invite resignation, nor does it propose a pious explanation of suffering. It affirms something different: that the apparent absence of an answer may be, in God's design, the condition for a greater gift that we are not yet in a position to recognise.
Saint Augustine does not formulate this conviction from an abstract idea. He had verified it in his own history.
His mother, Saint Monica, prayed for years for one thing alone: the conversion of her son. On the night he decided to set sail for Rome, she begged him not to leave. Augustine departed nonetheless. Only much later would he understand that this request was not granted precisely so that the one she had been raising throughout her life might be fulfilled: it was in Italy, and not in Africa, that he found the faith (cf. Confessions V, 8).
From that experience his teaching on prayer is born. In the letter he addresses to Proba, Augustine explains that praying is not intended to inform God of our needs, for He already knows them. We pray so that our desire may grow. God's gifts are great and our capacity to receive them is small; prayer widens that capacity until it makes us able to welcome them (cf. Letter 130).
Prayer does not change God: it transforms the one who prays.
This way of understanding prayer is part of what in this previous article we described as permanent conversion: the Christian life understood not as an acquired state, but as a path remade each day, and especially when it is not understood.
Leo XIV, formed in the Augustinian school, has repeatedly pointed to the strength of this legacy. Before the relics of the saint, in Pavia, on 20 June 2026, he underlined the value of interiority and observed that the need to return to oneself and not to be scattered in outward fragmentation reappears today with particular intensity, above all “in the questions of the young”. And he recalled, in Augustine's own words, that "truth dwells in the inner man".
In truth, this does not resolve the enigma of the silence of God, nor does it claim to. It proposes, more modestly, a change of gaze: not to judge the whole of a life by what is understood of it today, and to sustain prayer even when it seems to produce no effect at all.
Augustine needed more than thirty years to decipher his own history. The feast we celebrate on 28 August commemorates, among other things, that long patience.
This article continues Keys to understand the spirituality of Saint Augustine.
Sources: Saint Marie Eugénie, Instructions de Chapitre, 1 August 1875 · Saint Augustine, Confessions V, 8, and Letter 130 to Proba · Leo XIV, homily at the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, Pavia, 20 June 2026.
Photography: Alfa y omega. Enson Renton