My adolescent life was a playground swing.

Back and forth:

Between Mom

And

Between Dad.

I never knew where to go, nor where I belonged.

I didn’t know where home was, for I couldn’t be close to them both.

I have often wondered why, in the long history of the Church, we do not hear more often about saints who lived through difficult family situations. Surely there were plenty, but it is not usually the aspect of their lives that we hear about. And so learning of St. Eugene’s life, and reading through his letters, I found myself grateful to know that I had a friend in heaven who understands my particular pain. Even someone who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Eugene, experienced similar trials and emotions that we do in the 21st century.

In life, more often than not, we do not get the apology that is due to us. And when we do, it frequently falls short of the words we need to hear. I have come to realize, for my personal situation, there are no words big enough, or deep enough, or sincere enough to compensate for what has been stolen from me.  With this realization, I finally stopped asking and waiting for the apology that does not exist. My pastor says, “It takes one to forgive.  And it takes two for reconciliation.  One can forgive without reconciliation, but one cannot have reconciliation without forgiveness.” I chose forgiveness.

However, the whole point of Lent is to do things that bring us closer to the heart of Jesus. And, if I want to be free to love someone in the vocation of marriage one day, how will I be able to do that if I am still carrying around resentful anger towards my parents? Do they deserve this reaction? Probably, but God loves them just the same as He loves me. So I embarked on a forty plus day journey of loving my parents through the eyes of Jesus Christ, whose love was so big that He died on the Cross for sins that He did not commit (cf CCC 598).

For those not married who believe they are called to marriage, you may know quite well the brokenness that keeps you in patterns that delay your readiness for the type of relationship that would lead into marriage.  In whichever category you find yourself, I submit that marriage has the potential to offer you significant healing.  For those who are married, when your marriage becomes difficult, and it will, the key is to turn toward – not from – your spouse.  The more you turn toward your spouse, with Christ, the more healing you will find.  This is because holy matrimony is a sacrament that heals, and it heals through the communion and sacrificial suffering modeled after Christ’s own sacrificial suffering to restore communion between us and God.

When I read Lucille Clifton’s “forgiving my father” poem, I was struck with deep resonance on how profoundly I related to it.  I realized that it actually ended up setting a framework for how I could track and understand my own (rocky) process of forgiving my own father.  I came to a few realizations about the process of forgiveness – both from the poem and my own struggle with it. So, in honor of this year’s Father’s Day, a day when we can reflect on our perfect, all-providing Heavenly Father, but also a day when we can acknowledge the grief in how perhaps our earthly fathers fell short, I would like to share what I realized here.

Though I hid, self-protected and continued to wear the masks that I thought gave me some value, Jesus never stopped seeking the real me underneath.  He never abandoned me.  All the while, He was patiently working on me, preparing my very calloused and guarded heart to be broken again through the second loss of my dad.  But this break would be healing and redemptive, because it would finally let Love Himself enter in.  And He came in through another father, His father and now mine – Good St. Joseph.  I truly believe everything started with my simple prayer after that providential homily.  St. Joseph became the guardian of my healing journey and continues to be my strong and faithful pillar along the way, in both explicit and sometimes hidden ways.

Throughout Scripture, the images and language used to describe God frequently evoke two of the strongest attachment relationships that we can know as human beings—the relationship between a child and a parent, and the relationship between spouses.

If your parents divorced when you were an adult, like mine did, you may have experienced strife over paying for a wedding or a car. For me, my parents fought over who paid for what while I was in law school, including the cost of the postage stamp used to mail my monthly check!  My parents’ contention over petty things affected my image of God the Father, who cannot be outdone in generosity (see Matthew 19:29).  If my parents argued over who paid an extra few pennies to help support me, I certainly could not rely on them to provide anything, including financially.

I thought that if I just sat down and listed all the things I ‘should’ be grateful for in my life that I would then become a person filled with gratitude. I saw this exercise as the ‘fix’ for my pain and struggles. All the people I read about who had done this seemed so happy and peaceful. I wanted that for myself! My experience in life, largely shaped by my parents divorce, had taught me (incorrectly) that if I wanted something I had to get it for myself. So I went for it, only to be disappointed again and again. 

It was a few months into my freshman year of college; I was at daily Mass with my friends. At this time, I was really beginning to become aware of how much pain my parents’ divorce had caused and continued to cause me. I remember sitting in Mass, attempting to calm myself, but feeling rising panic each time the priest said the word...

Last Friday, June 16th, I was blessed to attend the wedding of a dear friend of my husband's. Like me, my husband's friend is an ACoD. When I realized earlier this week that his wedding date coincided with the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, I decided that I wanted to make a special wedding card for the couple.

Sometimes I feel like I walk around in life on the verge of insanity. If someone could see into my mind, they might consider me a tad unstable. There seem to be so many voices in my head! I wonder, especially in times of crisis, how I am to move forward with all the noise. Of course, I want to believe His voice alone, but in moments of pain and agony, that seems like a near impossible task.

This poem came out of a recent time of prayer. When I was two years old, my father left my mother, my sister (3 months old), and myself. We saw him every other weekend for a few years, and then he remarried and moved around the country from job to job for most of my childhood. This poem expresses my struggle to call God “Abba” and to trust in His loving, faithful presence.

The inner critic is a very demanding, uninvited voice in your head that chastises you for being inept, bad, or deficient. It undermines your self-confidence and increases your self-doubt. ... So what can we do about our internal critic?

When my father left the family during my late teens, I fell right back into infancy: I was unable to call my father “dad” because “dad” was no longer present. And that translated to my relationship with God: I did not call God “Father” because it seemed that God left me, too.

This year, my husband went on a Life-Giving Wounds retreat, and I am now forever grateful to this ministry. My husband left with a lack of understanding of his pain and his story, but returned to me and our family with the gifts of knowledge of himself and his pain, and a deeper understanding of his story. He was understood on the level of the heart that only something like this ministry can give. He came home with a correction of “oh, it doesn’t affect me” to “it affects everything in my life.”

I was at a crossroads. My heart ached for this love to be true, I wanted so badly to believe it was for me, but I was so scared what that might mean. How silly! My life had changed 180 degrees over those 7 years, so what the heck was I waiting for? What was I scared of? I was scared that God would change his mind, like I thought love did when my parents divorced when I just a baby...

One of the most common requests we receive in Life-Giving Wounds ministry is that we speak more to the issue of annulments. Even though this would be a great topic for a support group meeting (and may well be addressed in that format in the future), I thought I’d share my own thoughts on the matter. In this post, I hope to provide a few pointers and some encouragement.

Spiritual direction is the art of guiding someone or being guided to greater growth in the spiritual life and ultimately to the goal of becoming the saint that God has created each one of us to be. Put simply: our goal in this life is to get to Heaven, become holy, and enjoy eternal happiness, and a spiritual director helps us to get there. The true spiritual director is the Holy Spirit, and so both the spiritual director and the directee must be in relationship with the Holy Spirit through prayer and the sacraments to be able to listen to His voice and follow where He is leading.