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Question

Dear Father Angelo,

First of all thank you for the work you do. Everything written on this site has been good for my spirituality.

I recently lost my life partner, we had been together for 12 years and she was everything to me. It was she that I felt I was protecting, unfortunately she had a congenital disease in the brain. An arteriovenous malformation in the center of the head, inoperable. When I met her I was already aware of it and precisely this fragility of hers that made itself known in many small difficulties for her during the day, had become my strength. I now call her “my most precious jewel”, the one that God wanted to give me but which unfortunately is no longer there for me now. I feel useless to the world because I was useful to her and now she doesn’t need me anymore. I always pray to God that He won’t make me selfish to pray to have her back. She would not be better off with me, the love I can give her does not exceed the love of Christ. I’m the one who needs her and she doesn’t need me now.

You see father, I was not a believer. Maybe lukewarm, but surely ignorant  on doctrine and all the rest. Almost atheist actually. 

Her mother then made a gesture that shocked me, she called the parish priest and let him give her extreme unction since she was in a coma and could not confess or communicate. As for me, I saw this gesture as a kind of surrender, I did not want. What harm was I going to do.

Something extraordinary happened after her death, unexpected for me. I believe, and I strongly believe. I don’t even know why. I had a strong, very strong call to God. I felt I had to pray for her and for her soul. I did it. I prayed and I pray every day. Not just for her of course. And so my journey of conversion begins. I strive to respect the law of the Lord. I never learned the commandments, not even as a child, but now I don’t know why I know them by heart. But all this is not enough for me, I would like to be “perfect” for God. But I can’t. I have known the sacrament of reconciliation, I use it like never before. The Lord has also given me the grace of some signs that have upset my life for good. It is as if He had wanted to give me confirmation that the path taken was the right one.

But my loneliness is overwhelming at times. I can’t look at a woman with the eyes with which I looked at my loved one, I have no pretense or desire to bond with anyone else, ever. But in loneliness and despair I sometimes fall into sin. I am sick, I have a strong pain in not being able to receive Jesus in the Eucharist. I feel it alive in that bread, but I cannot have part of it. For me who was used to a life without God, this is shocking. But God did this. Reconciliation is a cure-all for me, but sometimes I feel stupid to present myself with the same sin. Even after a few days. I have no justification, I know. Unfortunately sometimes I feel very very alone and the worries of a life that for me has changed in a few hours after 12 years overwhelm me. There, I fall and find myself on my knees before God asking for forgiveness for the umpteenth time. I never take pleasure in the conclusion, only in the formation of desire does something move. But the act itself gives me nothing, not only emotionally but also physically. It is as if I no longer feel pleasure after what happened to me. How can I know if my sinful condition is mortal or perhaps lessened? Could this enable me to participate in the Lord’s table? These are silly questions I know, but they are my torment.

God bless you and protect us.

Gianluca

Answer from the priest

Dear Gianluca,

1. I thank the Lord with you that in the moment of your most serious despair He entered into you as Resurrection and life.

I think this is a gift your partner got you.

It is true that cohabitation is an objectively incorrect situation.

But your partner died with that sacrament which for her was the very last anointing, that is, the ultimate sanctification.

At that moment Jesus entered her soul and body, purified her from all sin and disposed her to celebrate her wedding in Heaven.

2. I think of Saint Catherine of Siena who prepared a condemned to death, Nicolò di Tuldo, in this very way.

In the supreme moment of his life, she said to him in fourteenth-century Italian: “Down, at the wedding, my sweet brother who will soon come to a lasting life” (Down, at the wedding, my sweet brother who will soon reach the life that has no end “.

And just as Nicolò remained with his eye fixed on God and equally on Catherine, so does your partner too, from the moment of her death which coincides with that of her entry into Paradise, she keeps her gaze fixed on God and on you, who in the present life  loved her and rendered her many services.

3. Your conversion is her gift from Heaven.

With a gift and with such a great and permanent grace, I am not surprised that you say: “I can’t look at a woman with the eyes I used to look at my loved one, I have no pretense or desire to bond with anyone else, ever”.

Her death, instead of separating you from her, has united you even more strongly.

4. As you yourself observed, when she lived with you it was she who needed you, because only you could give her so many things. 

Now, however, things have turned upside down: it is you who need her and she provides for you from a higher position.

This position is higher because it is in Heaven.

At the same time it is very interior to you because you now live in the grace of God and for this very reason you feel her  alive in your heart.

There is not only the memory, but she is there . 

5. There is a communion that lasts, there is a giving of many things to each other.

She gave you Jesus Christ, she gave you back your faith, she got you to approach the sacraments of confession and the Eucharist which are sacraments of life, she made you rediscover the ways of God (the commandments and the Gospel), she has procured you to begin a life that renews you more and more, she has obtained you to walk in the Light, to no longer be in that darkness and that inner darkness in which you instead lived when you did not have God who lived personally inside your heart.

Now that you have God, you are inwardly satiated however evidently as one can be in this life.

6. Communion also lasts on your part because she lives together with God in you.

Now you give her your prayer, your affection accompanied also by feelings of loneliness and tears because you lack her material presence.

You give her your thanks because it was easy for you to understand how all the goods that came to you after her death are in connection with her death, in particular with that last (extreme) anointing.

You communicate your gratitude to her because she has obtained that the communion between you and her has not been cut off, but continues.

It is no longer the same, of course.

But in some respects it is deeper, more continuous and even more profitable.

7. How beautiful is the faith transmitted by the first preface of the Mass for the dead: “From your faithful, O Lord, life is not taken, but transformed”.

8. I come now to the point in your private life that is troubling you.

I have no reason to deny the truth of any of the words you wrote to me.

However, I am afraid that telling you that for you it is subjectively less serious does not help you in the effort to eliminate this stumbling block.

8. Furthermore, frequent approach to the Sacrament of Reconciliation is an immense resource, whether one lives in grace or has lost grace.

Indeed, my desire would be that you can also confess every week, regardless of the presence of serious sins.

Regular and frequent confession, possibly always made by the same priest, is an immense grace.

Don Bosco recommended it.

You will feel a spiritual freshness that you cannot do without.

You will also understand more directly what the Gospel means when we read that on the Feast of Booths Jesus shouted out some very important words.

9. I would like to emphasize that “he cried out loud” because there is a precious message in this voice that was deliberately extraordinarily strong.

Here, then, is what we read: “On the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood up and exclaimed aloud: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them” (Jn 7: 37-38).

Living water is the water that comes out of the source.

Here the living water is the grace that comes from the Holy Spirit who dwells in you.

I have the impression that when there are those stumbles you feel that from your heart the grace that previously made you feel the presence of God from heart to heart no longer gushes out.

I wish you well, I gladly entrust you to the Lord and I bless you.

Father Angelo