“Addictions are ways in which we sin, and sin repeatedly,” the nun said sympathetically. “They always involve the people we love, dragging them down with us.”
Susan nodded, looking down at the balled-up tissue she was clutching. After the agony of this sex business, she herself felt besmirched. She knew her children felt it too – smeared filthy with Jim’s sins, and deeply angry.
It was from that day forward that Susan dated their recovery. Small steps back to sanity, beginning with her own trip to the confessional after more than 20 years away from the Sacrament. The priest was compassionate, listening carefully to her halting attempts to explain her life, between floods of tears that often left her unable to speak between wracking sobs. He taught her The Prayer. I renounce my will. I turn it all over to you, Mary my true mother, to lay at the feet of Your Son. Not my will, but His be done.
“For your penance, I want you to say this prayer at least three times a day, and I want you to visualize taking these great burdens off your shoulders, and laying them at the feet of Our Lord,” he told her. In the darkness of the confessional, tears streamed down Susan’s face as she watched his hand raise in the words of absolution. Afterwards, she knelt in the pew for a very long time, repeating the Prayer over and over again.
She felt cleansed, and at peace for the first time in years, strong enough to persevere through the annulment process from her first husband. She then obtained a simple ‘disparity of cult’ document for her marriage to Jim. A year later, Susan had a heart-to-heart talk with her children.
“The Church took very seriously what I – in my ignorant youth – refused to,” she told them. “This is because the Church understands marriage as a sacrament – not simply as an agreement between a man and a woman that can be dissolved at will. If I had understood that, I would have gotten my first marriage annulled after it was over – which would have helped me understand that both of us had gone into that marriage completely incapable of sustaining it. It would have also prevented me from marrying your father.”The girl hung her head. “That means that I would have never been born,” she whispered sadly. Her brother looked away stonily.
“Yes,” Susan said quietly. Then she smiled and took both young people in her arms. “But God is always generous, and He gave me you – the lights of my life. You both were the greatest gift I have ever received.”
But Susan wasn’t finished. “That a marriage should be open to life turns sex into a completely different thing,” she went on doggedly, despite her children’s evident discomfort. “The Church understands the body with great reverence, as the ‘temple’ of your soul.
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