Different places in our faith

[Ms_Manners]

I am a new member, so please excuse me if this is supposed to be somewhere else.

I wasn’t always a very good Catholic, but I feel the need, the urge to live more and more in accordance with my religion.
Now I am really trying to change some things, but I have some issues.

I am engaged. We will be married later this year.
We have been living together for a year. The reason is financial, I could not afford to live alone and my relationship with my family is… Best when non-existent, unfortunately. I left my parent’s home literally in the middle of the night. Although we live together, we do not have intercourse. (I must admit, we used to before.)
However, we do feel the instict sometimes. We abstain, but it can really be very hard.
In this area I guess I am just looking for a little support, and maybe some tips if anyone has any.

There are other things that worry me more.
He was recently baptized, his parents didn’t want to do it when he was a child and they weren’t happy when he decided to do it.
I was very happy, I wanted to share things with him, he always kinda believed there was a God (went to R.E. on his own when he was a kid), but it turns out that he is not practical enought for I would like now.
I want him to go to church every Sunday, but he often doesn’t feel like it. He often works on Sunday (no choice about it unfortunately), so he is tired, or the mass is at a time which is really inconvenient, or other excuses. Especially now in the summer, there are fewer services and we have to go to another parish when he works on Sunday. Ok, he does get tired, but there is time to rest before church, and it is inconvenient when we have to have lunch somewhat late if we want to go to church, but still I would like to go and I would like him to go with me.
Often we see women with their children at church, and we both agree that whole families are nicer. But in the last month or so we seem to be turning into one of those families where the father prefers to stay at home!
He is supposed to be my partner in life, and how can it if I go to church alone and pray on my own all the time? On the other hand, I know I could nag him into it, but that is not how I want it to happen.

Another thing is NFP.
I want to use it (when we are married), but I can’t find information or a course nearby. Personally, it would be difficult, because of my job I think we will have to wait for a while to have a child, but he doesn’t want to risk it too early. (I would lose my job, the situation for young women is very bad in my country.) He… Well, he wants to have sex when we feel like it, and we do not quite agree on the use of birth-control even in marriage.

He says he will grow into all of those things, but it will be hard if he avoids going to church and I really would be very happy if we were both on the same page here.

How can I encourage him? Generally, what can I do?

 

[Joe_5859]

I would really encourage you to make an appointment and discuss these things with your priest. He will be able to advise you in ways that we anonymous internet posters cannot.

I would encourage you to try to find some way to alter the living arrangements. It certainly won’t be easy since you are already living together, but it would be well worth doing. Perhaps your priest knows of someone in the parish who could take you in temporarily.

Beyond the obvious temptation to sexual sin (which you admit to feeling that temptation), living together also can complicate the discernment process. It’s much easier to convince yourself that things will change after you get married when you’ve already put in the investment of living together and moving out is so inconvenient and financially risky. That makes it difficult to approach the relationship from a place of strength.

Going to Mass every Sunday is an obligation for us Catholics. Having to work can be a legitimate reason to miss Mass, but we need to be careful not to let it become an easy excuse. Again, your priest would be in a better position to parse out your individual situation. For me, I think it is good to reflect on exactly what happens at Mass. Jesus Himself is present and wants to be present within us through the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Imagine if the Pope was coming to your local Church (or if the Pope isn’t that exciting for your fiance, then perhaps some famous celebrity or sports player). Tired or not, we would definitely be there. Well, Jesus is far more important than any celebrity.

I will pray for you in your discernment.

 

[Ms_Manners]

I would really encourage you to make an appointment and discuss these things with your priest. He will be able to advise you in ways that we anonymous internet posters cannot.

I would encourage you to try to find some way to alter the living arrangements. It certainly won’t be easy since you are already living together, but it would be well worth doing. Perhaps your priest knows of someone in the parish who could take you in temporarily.

I have had a chance to talk with our priest shortly, but he seems too busy for a real appointment, always promises to call me back but it takes him weeks to do so.

At the last confession I got a chance to talk to another priest for a few minutes, especially concerning my relationship with my family (complicated) and our living arrangements. Basically, his advice in the end was not for me to move our, since the wedding is close and we are committed to not doing anything, just to be cautious and go to church.
Actually, the sexual temptation is not even much stronger than before we were living together, but we are both really very determined not to act on it, even when we are really tempted. I just feel like I need someone to tell me that it’s okay to feel like that sometimes (but of course not act on it or encourage such thoughts), maybe that I am not the only one feeling like that, I sometimes feel like there is no one to talk to about it. We are new in our parish (I didn’t live there before and he wasn’t involved) and it seems to be a very old parish, not many activities for young people and they are all very structured, with a strict schedule, I just don’t know how to even find someone to talk to about this, especially no women.

Going to Mass every Sunday is an obligation for us Catholics. Having to work can be a legitimate reason to miss Mass, but we need to be careful not to let it become an easy excuse.

And that is my problem.
We have both had a really bad month or two, I was away on business on two occasions (both including the weekend), and there were some health issues, but I feel that sometimes they were more excuses than reasons, and I don’t like that.
I know it sounds like justifying him, but he has been working on some things, and not just religion-related, I know he has it in him, and it’s not that he doesn’t want to participate at all, he just says he needs time to get used to some things, and I suppose I can understand that up to a point, but I am not sure about the best way to do encourage him and get him to open up a little more.
For example, the thing I said about mothers and children without fathers at church, we both agree we don’t want to be like that, but I am not about to wait for the children to come to get him to go regularly.

I will pray for you in your discernment.

Thank you.

 

[TheRealJuliane]

I’m going to advise you to consider this man as a finished product. Not a project.

If he never changed from how he is exactly at this moment, would you want to marry him and have him be the father of your children?

Not as you wish him to be at some point in the future, not how he might change in the direction you want him to, not as you think would be best for him, but how he IS RIGHT NOW.

Think about that very carefully. Marriage is a permanent bond.

 

[Pink_Lemonade]

I’m going to advise you to consider this man as a finished product. Not a project.

If he never changed from how he is exactly at this moment, would you want to marry him and have him be the father of your children?

Not as you wish him to be at some point in the future, not how he might change in the direction you want him to, not as you think would be best for him, but how he IS RIGHT NOW.

Think about that very carefully. Marriage is a permanent bond.

Please take this advice. Whether or not he “needs time to get used to things” should not be a consideration for you. It does sound like you are going into this marriage expecting that you can actually do something to make him turn out the way you want him to be.

Can you be okay with your husband rarely attending Mass with you and insisting upon using birth control? Is that what you really want? It’s good that you are not intimate anymore, but even living together may be making your judgment more difficult. You’re already sharing a living space, and acting like spouses, so removing yourself from the situation to figure out what you should do is impossible.

I realize that you did not ask whether you should marry him or not, but remember that even engagement is a period of discernment. And if you don’t like how he is now, you can’t expect that he’s going to change.

 

[Ms_Manners]

We talked about it again the other day. I realized that a big part of the problem is the approach we get in most R.E. classes and parishes here. There are no explanations, not good ones, the best you can get is a very elaborated version of “because God says so”. Of course, that is in the end a reason, but when it is the only answer to any kind of question, from “why do we have to go to church every weekend?” to “why can’t I kill people?” (exaggerating on purpose here), it loses a lot. Sometimes you feel like they don’t really know and they are just all repeating the same thing to stay safe. No one in mainstream religious education or anything similar ever explained these things to me either, but I was lucky enough to meet some people and learn some things outside of that. I can tell apart the teacher and the subject, so to say.
Sad to say, even I could explain some things better than he’d ever heard them explained before.
Many priests here are not that open and not very accomodating when you have questions or want to discuss anything. (It seems that most other posters here are from the US, we are worlds away, old-school approaches to education run deep even in church, if not especially there.

It also turns out that it was my fault, too. I wanted to pray with him, but was afraid he would think it was silly. I was reluctant because I am used to people even insulting me when they hear that I really do believe in God and I was afraid he would react in a way that would hurt way too much from him. I was waiting for him to come to me. I should have had more trust in him. He didn’t know how to approach the whole thing and was waiting for more direct encouragement from me. He feels more lost than I thought at Mass because he is still new to everything, he cannot catch up sometimes, and there are only children’s guidebooks for what happens and how you are supposed to participate.
It was easier for me, they took us through it step by step and I was a child when I learned all the stuff.

As far as NFP and birth control go… He would never insist on using anything against my will, since that would actually mean insisting on intimacy I don’t really want.
It is a very difficult subject for us, I am looking for information, but so far it is not very encouraging.
We definitely want to have children, but there are some health issues that make it potentially dangerous for me to give birth, but also to be intimate without protection. So we are afraid that the only option other than protection (I know it is not generally a good word, but the purpose isn’t even birth control, but really the protection of my health) will be complete celibacy, not only during fertile days. (Even now when I am completely abstaining, I have problems, and when I was intimate it was basically a rule.)
For example, if I got pregnant, instead of being able to be intimate care-free, we would definitely have to use protection or completely abstain, because treatment if I had problems would be potentially harmful to the baby. In that case there would be no talk of using that method to avoid having a child, but protecting the child that already was conceived. I have found a Catholic GP, but I cannot find a generally good OBGYN in our area, let alone a Catholic one (There are only three very bad ones in our whole town.)
I don’t know how that would influence our relationship in the longest long run. I don’t want to live in sin, but there are some things you are supposed to be able to do in a marriage, and this is a very difficult prognosis.

 

[Ms_Manners]

I cannot resist an update, it makes me so happy…

Soon a Bible study/discussion group is starting at church, and he said he would like to go with me. I am really happy about it!
I will go definitely, he said he would come a few times and then decide, but I hope he will join the group.
It’s a discussion group, the only one for people our age, and he would prefer to be more passive, observe and listen at first, so we have to see if that’s okay with the group.
He says he feels insecure and a little overwhelmed at times because he is new to everything and there is so much he doesn’t know or doesn’t understand. But he does want to do it himself.

We have been going to Mass regularly now, he has started participating more, we even went when we had a really long and difficult Sunday, work and an emergency and we barely made it.

I’m not pushing him, but I cannot hide how much it brightens my day to see him getting involved.

I pray that he continues to feel more comfortable and that he feels that he wants to get more involved.

 

[Joe_5859]

I cannot resist an update, it makes me so happy…

Soon a Bible study/discussion group is starting at church, and he said he would like to go with me. I am really happy about it!
I will go definitely, he said he would come a few times and then decide, but I hope he will join the group.
It’s a discussion group, the only one for people our age, and he would prefer to be more passive, observe and listen at first, so we have to see if that’s okay with the group.
He says he feels insecure and a little overwhelmed at times because he is new to everything and there is so much he doesn’t know or doesn’t understand. But he does want to do it himself.

We have been going to Mass regularly now, he has started participating more, we even went when we had a really long and difficult Sunday, work and an emergency and we barely made it.

I’m not pushing him, but I cannot hide how much it brightens my day to see him getting involved.

I pray that he continues to feel more comfortable and that he feels that he wants to get more involved.

That’s great news! Thank you for sharing this update.

 

[Ms_Manners]

We have been married since December. We have moved to another town, so we are looking at activities and parishes where we live now. We go to church together, to three parishes, depending on our work schedules. We went to confession together yesterday, it was his second confession ever, the first was in December. It is still weird for him, but he does go and takes it seriously. Moving was a little crazy, so we haven’t really joined in non-basic activities yet, but we are looking forward to some we learned about. Some information isn’t really announced, but a friend who is very involved told us about some lectures and some other activities we will definitely go to after the Lent/Easter break. Some sound like a lot of fun, like dancing for married couples, ballroom and even salsa. I used to teach English, I kind of miss it, I found out yesterday that a parish a few blocks from our house has study sessions for kids so I will probably volunteer there. It would be good to have a decent place to go out sometimes. It will also be good for him to have a familiar face, someone he likes there.

On Saturday we are going to the parish where he was baptised and where we were married, as sort of an anniversary of his baptism, he said he really wanted to go there.

Things are working out and working out well.