“Well,” she answered. “First I went back to church to find my soul again. And my sanity.”
"Did that work?”
“Yes, although I had to hunt around to find a priest who offered Confession.”
“Why? What did you have to confess?”
At this, she smiled. “Twenty years of living outside the church,” she told me, still smiling. “And all the sins of living so far away from God. But the worst was the sin of pride.”
“Why was that the worst?” I asked, even further mystified.
“Because my pride kept me from seeing how bad off I was. How I kept going back and doing the same thing to myself – and to you – over and over.”
Well, that made sense. I began to nod, cautiously.
“It was this stubborn pride of thinking I could make it on my own, without God. Without all those Catholic rules I had thrown away so many years ago.”
“Wait,” I said slowly. “So you think if you had played by the rules, you wouldn’t have had all those, er, bad relationships?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “If I had gotten an annulment when you were little, I would have understood what a Catholic marriage was. And how mature both people have to be. And how the grace from the sacraments was necessary for a marriage.”
“So, you would have not had boyfriends?”
At that, she broke into a huge grin.
Not the kind you sleep with!” she chuckled.
She laughed at the embarrassed look on my face,
“Honey, do you think that Jack, or any of those guys, would have hung around for very long if I told them I was a Catholic girl, and wouldn’t sleep with them?”
“Er, no,” I squirmed uncomfortably, until I thought it over. Once I did, I had to admit she was right. “I mean, of course not.”
“So, problem solved,” she smiled.
“But – how would you have ever found anyone?” I floundered.
“I never did find someone, did I?”
“First I went back to church to find my soul again. And my sanity.”
REGINA | 75