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I’m
. . . married over 20 years, have [several] great kids and a wonderful
wife. Here’s the deal: For the past 27 years I have not been able to
stop thinking about my high school girlfriend. We were young, ignorant, sexually
active. For me it was an excessive love. When she dropped me at 18, I spiraled
into severe depression, anxiety, sexual addiction, and drug and alcohol abuse
for some 5 years. When I married, I was an emotional wreck but covered up
pretty well. Over the years, I have improved slowly in fits and falls but
consistently so that today I make it through my day. I am a faithful Catholic
and have tried to be during my married life.
Now, I was a very sensitive, idealistic, narcissistic adolescent, and being
rejected by my girlfriend (my world, my love!) and the pathetic aftermath
remains for me a trauma that seems to affect or define my every waking moment.
I feel like I will take this unnatural “love” for this woman (that
I do not even know) to the grave. This loss is overwhelming, and I feel like
all I can do is just try to accept it. I’ve heard of pining for someone
for a few years but never this many unless the person was a stalker type,
which I was not, so I have difficulty placing it all. I have not spoken with
anyone about it because it seems to me to be a pathetic excuse for a deep
trauma. But it has affected me that way. Have you seen something like this
before?
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 see it all the time. But anyone
who is Christian should know that love for God is
more important than anyone or anything in your life—including your own
life. Sadly, most Christians—and most Catholics even—don’t
know this. And that’s why I was told to make this website.
So let’s read Luke
14:26.
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If anyone comes
to Me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and
sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. |
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—Luke 14:26 |
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Now, hate as used here
does not mean “to wish harm to.” Instead it means “to remove
your emotional dependence on.”
And that’s why Holy Matrimony
is not based in romance. Romance is a secular
medieval literary concept that seeks emotional fulfillment in another person
to compensate for the emptiness that results from a lack of religious
faith. But if you know—and
believe—that God loves you, then you don’t
need to look for recognition through other persons. So instead of trying
vainly to fill yourself with fantasies of romance, you can . . .
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. . . know the
love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all
the fullness of God. |
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—Ephesians 3:19 |
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So if Holy Matrimony is not based
in romance, then what is it all about?
Well, imagine two small weights,
joined together by a length of string. Notice that the string joins the weights,
but does not draw them together. Now, however, if you pick up the string
in the middle and lift it up, then the two weights, drawn upward with the
string, will swing together.
That’s Holy Matrimony. In
the sacrament of matrimony, a man and a woman are drawn together when they
are mutually lifted up by God’s love through the sacramental presence
of Christ.
Holy Matrimony, therefore, is
an act of service to God, to bring children into the world for one purpose:
to love and to fear
God. A Christian husband and wife are drawn together not by emotional fulfillment
in each other but by their mutual love for God.
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Now don’t
get me wrong here about intimacy between a husband and wife.
Emotional
intimacy enhances
all human relationships, and so it must be present in Holy Matrimony as well,
as a concrete expression of one’s mystical intimacy with God.
Sexual
intimacy is necessary
for conceiving children, and, as long as it is not
closed to procreation, it can serve to strengthen
the bond between the husband and wife in their service to God. But once sexuality
is stripped of its essential procreative nature and made into a recreational
sport, it degenerates into a seductive flirtation
with death that defiles matrimony (see Tobit 8:1-8). |
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So, considering all this, then,
your attachment for your old girlfriend is just a romantic
illusion you are keeping alive because you
fear dying to the world. And why do you fear
dying to the world? Because you fear the consequences
of loving God with “all your heart, and all your soul, and all your
strength.”
And I know it’s hard to
hear this because I had to hear it myself once. I, too, had to let go of
my own “imaginary” love for an
“ideal” woman. But that letting go is what it takes to set
out on the mystic path to true Christianity. You simply cannot get to God
if you cling to anything in this world—whether it be another person,
a social identity, a substance (such as
alcohol or drugs or
cigarettes or
food), or wealth and riches. Christ said that
plain as day. And still most of us refuse to believe
it.
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