We still hadn’t even finished writing out the thank you notes for the wedding gifts when the effects of my husband’s lust addiction first hit hard. We had been married for less than three months. It was a rainy Friday night, and I’d made it home from work first. I’d...
The night I visited my first meeting for family and friends of lust addicts, I heard so many new terms in the space of that hour that, for a second, I wondered if I’d landed on another planet. None of the words were exactly foreign, but the folks in that meeting used...
I remember being at a Catholic spirituality conference the summer before I got married. The conference included a time of Eucharistic adoration, and so in the silence of that space, I did what any faithful Catholic fiancée would do and opened up to God about my fears....
My forty-sixth birthday had just passed. I looked in the mirror on my husband’s side of the room. He was in the bathroom, and his was the only mirror available. I pressed my fingertips to the sides of my cheeks. There was no denying it: my laugh lines, the parentheses...
When I had been dating my husband for about three months, I told him I was getting concerned about our relationship. I was feeling like he wasn’t listening to me as much as I was listening to him, and I was wondering if we could address this so we could work things...
In the previous article, we journeyed with Dante from the first terrace of Mt. Purgatory to the fourth, covering the sins or character defects of pride, envy, wrath, and sloth. Dante sees firsthand how the souls are purified from their attachments to particular sins...
In his writings, Saint Thomas Aquinas describes sight to be the principal and primary of all the senses. His reasoning is that when we open our eyes and look at something, we are immediately abstracting—taking into our minds—what we see and rearranging it in an...
In my previous article, I discussed how Dante made his descent into the depths of Hell to not only witness the torments of unrepentant sinners but also face down his own sin and personal hell. At the end of Dante’s Inferno, at the very bottom of the ninth circle,...
How can each gift of the Holy Spirit help us stay sober in our recovery as well as grow closer to the Lord? As Saint Thomas Aquinas illuminated, God helps humanity in its process of perfection with particular habits. These habits or instincts enable us to transcend...
I remember the moment I came to terms with my addiction: the moment I stepped out of denial and into God’s healing light. I had no idea what would happen. I was scared and overwhelmed with guilt and shame. I had gone almost twenty years without openly acknowledging...