Everybody goals of an ideal relationship… an ideal marriage… an ideal love.
However similar to any good love story, there are challenges and self-doubts.
We regularly surprise if the love we selected is price it ultimately and we battle to make each relationship work.
Carmen Briceno went by means of all these on the trail to her marriage… with God.
Now, earlier than you scrunch up your face in that incredulous look, Briceno isn’t a nun. She’s a “Consecrated Virgin,” and there’s a nice distinction between the 2 vocations.
In a 2016 Good Housekeeping article, Briceno recounts her love story and the way she got here to appreciate {that a} marriage with God is precisely what she wished and wanted in her life.
Identical to every other love story, the principle characters begin off as strangers.
“Rising up, I used to be what you may name a ‘cradle Catholic’ — my household went to mass each Sunday, however we weren’t extremely non secular, extra culturally Catholic.
I did not have a deeply private relationship with God in any sense,” she recounts.
Briceno bought the chance to get to know God and her faith extra when she met a Christian pal, who woke up in her a curiosity about her personal relationship with Jesus.
“[She] was instrumental in demonstrating to me what a relationship with God may actually be like as a result of in her I noticed a deep, tangible love and a private connection to Jesus Christ.
Watching Jesus alive in her, I believed, That. I need that,” she mentioned.
After a visit to Cologne, Germany for Worldwide World Youth Day, an annual occasion organized by the Catholic Church for younger folks, one thing stirred in Briceno, a “blaze” of religion.
She discovered about consecrated virgins, and believed that the vocation aligned with what she believed and understood about “God’s present of sexuality.”
In response to Wikipedia, a consecrated virgin is a lady “who has been consecrated by the church to a lifetime of perpetual virginity within the service of God. [They] are to spend their time in works of penance and mercy, in apostolic exercise and in prayer, in keeping with their state of life and religious items.”
Consecrated virgins are usually not nuns. They dwell bizarre lives that additionally weave into their religious life, they usually have existed for hundreds of years, relationship all the way in which again to the Vestal Virgins of historical Rome.
All through this love story, Briceno was challenged by opposition and doubts from her household.
However she was already in love. “Dwelling as a consecrated virgin got here from love, and it was that which so appealed to me,” she mentioned.
Identical to any relationship, she needed to uncover for herself if this was what she really wished.
She lived in a home with different girls contemplating the consecrated life the place, along with dwelling their on a regular basis bizarre lives, additionally they stuffed their days with prayers and reflections.
In August 2009, Briceno made her resolution and petitioned to develop into a consecrated virgin. She was marrying God.
And he or she has by no means been happier. “It is sacrificial, and I am conscious of that. I’m utterly full of pleasure and happiness,” mentioned Briceno.
After all, being in a wedding with God isn’t with out its challenges.
She has to reply many questions on why she selected this life if she ever will get lonely, and if she ever desires her personal youngsters.
“In relation to human sexuality, they suppose they know what the church teaches and why — they usually make up their thoughts towards it,” she concludes. “However once you clarify the that means of the human physique and intercourse and the fantastic thing about the church’s educating, they usually perceive and fall in love with how God made them.”
Caithlin Pena is an editor and former contributor for YourTango. Her work has been featured on Thought Catalog, Huffington Publish, Yahoo, Psych Central, and BRIDES.
