Question
Good morning Father,
First of all I thank you for this space that you devote to all of us, and for the answer to this question of mine that afflicts me.
Father, I am a 36-year-old boy, engaged for 4 years and cohabiting for the same years.
I converted a few months ago, when, totally ignoring the moral and divine laws, I felt out of nowhere a strong need to confess my sins of years spent without sacraments. Now I am doing everything to change my life, I try to pray at least 2 times a day, I go to mass, and I have definitively broken with many of the sins I have committed.
But I’m scared about my cohabitation situation.
Right after my conversion I asked my beloved Silvia to marry me.
And I talked to her about practicing abstinence in these 8 months that separate us from marriage.
I took this commitment very seriously, but she, after a few quarrels, understood my request but she says that she doesn’t know if she will be able to wait that long. Therefore I sometimes feel pressured to have intercourse. I feel that she is slowly changing, but not completely.
We once fought so much that I feared the breakup. She is determined to get married but, not following the same path as me, she does not fully understand.
I come to the question:
Although with all my heart I no longer want to have intercourse so as not to offend our lord, on the other hand I also understand that my girlfriend has been overwhelmed by my breakthrough and does not understand well: if I were to give in, what would happen?
I would like to confess soon after because I would feel dirty.
Will our Lord understand my situation? I am afraid, Father, because I know that 8 hard months await me. I repeat that if my fiancée had told me she was willing to wait until the wedding I would have done it. She’s trying hard, but she hasn’t assured me that she’ll be able to do it all these months.
Thank you Father, give me some help, some advice, some comfort.
May the Lord bless you.
Answer
Dear friend,
1. I apologize for such a late reply.
But only today I got to your email.
2. In the meantime, I am delighted by the way the Lord has entered your life almost suddenly.
It was a rebirth, a spring, a beginning to fly high.
Now you have realized that encountering Jesus Christ is the same as encountering “the resurrection and the life” (Jn 11:25).
At the same time you also grasped the importance of purity.
You understood that the Lord was not coming to take anything away from you.
On the contrary, he came to purify, to elevate, to make everything more beautiful, younger and holier.
3. I can imagine the anxiety of making your girlfriend feel what you felt.
But you immediately understood how difficult it is to get God into souls.
God does not enter them except by freeing them from what prevents him from entering.
These hindrances are sins, which are just the opposite of opening up and keeping oneself open to God.
4. I hope that your girlfriend has gradually understood you, has respected you and has become capable of overcoming herself, thus giving you tangible proof of being a girl and a wife you can count on.
5. If the two of you have lived chastely during this time I am sure you have felt that this was the best time of your engagement. The time when your love became purer, truer.
I think you felt the desire to thank the Lord for making you discover chastity, her perfume, her beauty.
Your engagement would have missed the better part if chastity had been absent.
6. Even St. Augustine, after a youth spent in lust and concupiscence, knew the Lord and at the same time he also discovered the charm of purity, which is the insuppressible condition for being able to rise oneself above.
I’d like to quote his Confessions page, which in many ways seems to portray your girlfriend’s starting point:
“The very toys of toys, and vanities of vanities, my old mistresses, still enthralled me; they shook my fleshly garment, and whispered softly, ‘Do you part with us? And from that moment shall we no more be with you for ever? And from that moment shall not this or that be lawful for you for ever?’ And what did they suggest to me in the words ‘this or that’? What is it that they suggested, O my God? (…).
But now it said this very faintly; for on that side towards which I had set my face, and whither I trembled to go, did the chaste dignity of Continence appear unto me, cheerful, but not dissolutely gay, honestly alluring me to come and doubt nothing, and extending her holy hands, full of a multiplicity of good examples, to receive and embrace me. There were there so many young men and maidens, a multitude of youth and every age, grave widows and ancient virgins, and Continence herself in all, not barren, but a fruitful mother of children of joys, by You, O Lord, her Husband.
And she smiled on me with an encouraging mockery, as if to say, ‘Can you not do what these youths and maidens can? Or can one or other do it of themselves, and not rather in the Lord their God?’ (…).
This controversy in my heart was naught but self against self (…).
I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when I heard the voice as of a boy or girl, I know not which, coming from a neighbouring house, chanting, and oft repeating, ‘Take up and read; take up and read’.
Immediately my countenance was changed, and I began most earnestly to consider whether it was usual for children in any kind of game to sing such words; nor could I remember ever to have heard the like. So, restraining the torrent of my tears, I rose up, interpreting it no other way than as a command to me from Heaven to open the book, and to read the first chapter I should light upon.
So quickly I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting; for there had I put down the volume of the apostles, when I rose thence. I grasped, opened, and in silence read that paragraph on which my eyes first fell: ‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof’. (Rom 13:13)
No further would I read, nor did I need; for instantly, as the sentence ended — by a light, as it were, of security infused into my heart — all the gloom of doubt vanished away” (St. Augustine, Confessions, VIII, 11-12).
7. What Saint Augustine experienced, you too have experienced by the grace of God.
And you have felt that this is the right way.
So that you remain on this path together with your girlfriend who will soon become your wife too, I assure you of my prayers and I bless you.
Father Angelo
Translated by Chiara P.
