Struggling to the Surface

Christian
It’s very hard to revisit these times, very painful.
Not only for the loss and the pain of losing this baby, but also for the pain I had inflicted on Christine. I should have been her protector and I did nothing. I was desensitized completely. Pregnancy was an abstract concept to me; it didn’t seem real! Pregnancy was dissociated from baby.
Now, when I see ultrasounds of babies at every stage of life, pictures, and movies of the baby’s development, I can’t understand how we could have done what we did. It’s beyond imagination, beyond comprehension! A baby in the womb is so real, so alive.

Père J.M. Desbois

Christine
God in his Providence put a very holy priest on my path, Father Jean-Marie Desbois, a friend of my Mom’s family. I cannot remember exactly when, after the abortion, I met with him and confessed, but I think it was pretty soon. I didn’t feel the effect of this Confession right away, and I kept on living in sin. I kept this terrible event locked inside and would push the lid of the box shut each time it would attempt to open.

Only after our wedding in 1977 did the healing really begin. What is this grace we receive on our wedding day? Christ gives us a tremendous gift at that moment: He offers us the capacity to love each other as He loved the Church. He makes us capable of sacrificial, self-giving, selfless love; He offers us Agapè.

July 2nd, 1977

I was broken by my sin, hurting deeply, unable to truly love and give myself. Christian was deeply wounded too. Christ had to heal us first in order to allow us to become able to love fully.

The healing happened in steps--and is still going on!

After the first step of Reconciliation, today I can see the second step in the powerful testimony of a friend.
It was the end of 1981, and we lived in Aix en Provence. My Mom had asked me to pray for my brother’s endangered marriage. We didn’t go to church much, but I had decided to stop at the cathedral on my way back from ballet classes. But then time was short and I was about to change my mind, when I saw one of the ladies in my ballet class enter the cathedral. I thought, ‘if she’s going, I’m going.’ I went in behind her and asked her if it was where she came to mass. She told me she wasn’t Catholic but liked to stop here to pray. She then told me the story of her conversion! I was deeply touched and envious! Her story triggered a strong desire in me: I also wanted to have an encounter with Christ.

Aix en Provence, Cathedral Holy Savior

I made up my mind to go to a prayer group in Marseille. My sister had been praying with them when she lived there. It was a huge decision for me because I had learned to drive in Nebraska, and driving conditions around Marseille were vastly different! I hired a baby sitter for our two daughters, as Christian was on a business trip, and I left. I was scared, but I made it! I wasn’t good at parallel parking and the only parking spots there were parallel. I was about to give up and go home when this huge, American style car left, giving me ample space to practice my parking skills! I had no idea what a charismatic prayer group was. I joined the group and started praying with everybody. At one point, the leader invited those who wanted to kneel in the center to be prayed upon. I hadn’t come all this way for nothing, so I volunteered. I knelt and everyone started praying over me. The leader said this sentence (I thought it came from the Bible): “Come, my child, come and throw yourself into my ocean of love.” To me it was God the Father addressing me! I felt a great peace and a great joy come upon me. I felt I had been forgiven, I felt loved as never before! It was February 2^nd, 1982, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord. 

Marseille, Notre Dame de la Garde

The priest who was there also said that many knots were being untied within me and would continue to be untied in the coming months. This is how I started praying again. I started going back to mass every Sunday, and sometimes even during the week, or whenever possible. I started praying the Rosary daily, too, praying for Christian to experience this encounter also. I was back on track, the healing could continue!

Christian

It took much longer for me to return to God and the Church. But when I look back, it seems that I was away from the Church for a very short time; I hope that’s the way the Lord looks at this period too. Still it wasn’t easy for me to see Christine rediscovering this intimacy with the Lord. I felt kind of forgotten, neglected, jealous, maybe? The Lord was taking away the little time I had with my wife. I didn’t like it too much. But deep in my heart I knew!

I knew that that was the life we were called to. Of course, I resisted a bit, to show that I was still in control, and it’s true that I didn’t know what was going to happen, or where we were going but yes, we were called to the Real Life.

Us then, with Mathilde and Jehanne

Healing in the Sacrament, Part 1

-->

By Christine

Sacramental marriage is losing ground. 

Tying the knot

In the last 35 years, the amount of people getting married in a church has dropped 70%, and continues to decline by 5% each year. More and more young couples prefer cohabitation to a church wedding. It seems like marriage is only attractive to homosexuals now!

In our own family, most of our nephews and nieces, and even one of our daughters, have settled for cohabitation. What is their motive? Fear of the life-commitment? Rejection of the Church and institutions in general? Fear of divorce? They can’t even say they want to be different because everybody cohabitates! The ones who are different are the ones who marry.

I want to scream at them that what they reject is exactly what could make them happy; happy beyond anything they could imagine! What they reject is precisely what they long for. They have preconceived ideas about marriage, clichés that are conveyed by our culture. If they only knew what the grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony represents. They’re all enthusiastic about superhero movies, special effects defying all natural laws, magic, and the extraordinary, but they don’t know that the grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony beats them all!

Avengers: http://picsmixer.blogspot.com/2012/05/blog-post_08.html

I feel compelled to write about it, to yell on the rooftops that Christ’s grace is incredibly powerful, efficient in very concrete ways, and the best thing that can ever happen to anyone! I can affirm it because Christian and I experience it daily in our marriage! I want everyone to know that marriage rocks!

Of course, we didn’t know much about marriage either when we said yes on July 2^nd, 1977. We didn’t receive any marriage preparation and had been cohabiting for almost three years. Still, we didn’t think cohabiting could be a permanent solution, and we wanted to seal our love in marriage. We wanted to have children, and we instinctively knew that only a Catholic marriage would give our family the solid foundations it would need.

July 2nd, 1977

Now, 35 years later, we are in awe at what Christ accomplished in our relationship.

We wrote about the day we met on November 27^th, 1974. What we haven’t told you yet, is how broken and wounded we both were, and how we added to our brokenness through our three years of cohabiting. 

Christian and his mother

Me as a girl scout

Christian had lost his mother to cancer just the year before; his girlfriend had aborted their baby without even giving him a choice, a few months later. For me, I was craving to be loved. My year as an exchange student in Indiana had messed my moral and spiritual compass up. Everything I had believed in before Indiana was shaken. 

I had dreamt of giving myself only to the one who would be my husband. I had dreamt of strong Catholic values, and even though the dreams were still deep inside me, my actions had twisted everything upside down. This is who we were when we met: two hurt and lost kids! (to be continued).