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Jacintha ...an unexpected gift from God
Shaun Growney, who is divorced and returned to the
practice of his faith a few years ago, tells how he met and, following
the dissolution of his former marriage, married his wife Jacintha.
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"Surprised by love" In the course of that afternoon we discovered an affection for each other which went beyond ordinary friendship. I was surprised and not a little confused about this, but also excited and flattered that such a young woman would have any interest in me. I was confused partly because I had recently attended a 3 month long retreat with the Jesuits in North Wales and had come away with the idea that I might have a late (very late) vocation to the priesthood. I had even been to see the diocesan Director of Vocations about it. I was also confused because Jacintha and I were hardly a natural match. She was from a culture which was very different from mine. Her mother tongue was Sinhalese and her English, though quite good enough for her every day needs, was often not up to more complex demands. And although I learned a few expressions in Sinhalese from her I was not able to engage in even the simplest of Sinhalese conversations, let alone debate the burning issues of the day! "Praying together" Yet we got on extraordinarily well! And as I reflect now on why this should have been so, I have no doubt at all that the one thing that really brought us together (apart from simple physical attraction) was our faith. We were both clear that Jesus loved us and that we wanted to leam to know Him, love Him and serve Him more and more, and better and better, day by day. We soon started to pray together, something I had never done before with just one other person. Previously I had either prayed alone or with a larger group such as a prayer group or at Mass with the whole parish community. We found to our delight that there was a very special kind of intimacy in praying together as a couple. It brought us closer together and closer to Jesus too. Amongst other things, we prayed for some clarity about what was going on between us and we prayed that if marriage was in God's plan for us. He would clear the way for this to be possible. In the meantime we agreed that we would need to limit the expression of our love for each other within the boundaries of a close friendship. "Different experience from other friendship" This was a very different experience from the way I had dealt with relationships before Jesus came into my life. I had married very young (20 years old) and in the following years made many mistakes which led to separation and then divorce. By that time I had long since left the Church and had no relationship with God at all. So my attitude to relationships with women took no account of what the Church had to teach. I believe I was genuine in looking for lasting love rather than simply pursuing short term pleasure, but my ground rules and boundaries were ill conceived, sparse and easily breached. I took whatever opportunities presented themselves in a sort of experimental way and set no limits on what a meeting with a woman might lead to. So long as there was mutual consent, anything went. Naturally this led to many disastrous endings and considerable heartache all round. "A long wait" Then, just seven years ago I came back to the Church and allowed the grace of the Holy Spirit to fill me up and take control of my life. I've already told that story in an earlier edition of Goodnews so I won't go into it again now. Let it suffice to say that by the time I met Jacintha I was at peace with the grace of my singleness and my celibacy. She too was not eager to rush into anything despite the strong feelings of attraction that we had discovered over Sunday lunch. So, although we struggled with temptation from time to time, and indeed we did: more than once I felt it necessary to go to the sacrament of reconciliation to repent and ask for the grace of more self discipline, we both knew that the only way forward was the way of chastity and of reliance on God's guidance. Eventually, after much prayer and talk, we decided to plan and pray as if marriage was where we were being led. Then, if God opened up the path for this, we felt we could be sure that it was indeed His will. So, I applied through the diocese for a dissolution of my former marriage and we announced our hopes to family and friends. We became "an item", as they say, and spent as much time together as we were able to. The dissolution was eventually granted after a period of some 15 months, in May 2005, just after the election of Pope Benedict XVI. So we like to imagine that our application was the first item he found in his in-tray after his inauguration (though of course we know that in reality he doesn't deal with such matters personally). It was a long wait and during this time we were often asked what we would do if we didn't get the dissolution. We always said that we trusted that God would allow us to get it so long as we were faithful to our resolve and continued to pray. Having got the dissolution, there was still one more obstacle in our way - the Home Office! Because Jacintha is a foreign national we had to have their permission to marry as well as that of the Church. So, we went through that process too with as much patience as we could muster and in the meantime went through the marriage preparation sessions provided by the parish priest Father David who was eventually to marry us. These were an important final stage of our discernment process and both the challenges and the counsel we received were blessed with wisdom and insight. We looked deeply into our hearts and we prayed alone and together once more asking God to show us the way ahead. "God's gift to us" In the end we just had to trust our feelings doing our best to set aside the rose tinted glow of new love and so to find the underlying love that would last beyond the newness, to the end of our days. We believe that we received the grace of knowing that love and felt convinced that we were truly called to the vocation of marriage. So we went ahead and married in the parish church of St Vincent de Paul on Clapham Common on 17th September 2005. Subsequently, we also had celebration masses said in our new parish of Chertsey and in Jacintha's original parish in Katugastota in Sri Lanka, when we went there in January 2006. We both give praise and thanks to God for his gratuitous
love in allowing us to be together as man and wife in these our later
years and we pray now for ever more clarity in learning how way may
serve Him as "one flesh".
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I
met Jacintha in the church hall after Sunday mass where we had gathered
with others for coffee and biscuits. It was sometime in 2002.1 can't
remember the exact date, and neither can she. She was from Sri Lanka
and was working in London as a live-in nanny, a profession she had been
following for many years in Singapore and Hong Kong before coming to
England. For more than a year we only met at church on the random occasions
when we happened to be at the same mass. And in that time, it never
occurred to me to make any more of the relationship than that. For one
thing I was divorced and therefore not free to marry and for another,
though I didn't know her exact age, we were clearly from different generations.
I guessed she would be about 35 whilst I was already 58. As it turned
out she was actually rather older than she looked but still more than
a decade younger than me! Then one day I invited her along with a number
of others to my flat for Sunday lunch. I would do this three or four
times a year, as one or two others did among the "singles"
of the parish, and she had actually been to my place for Sunday lunch
once before. However, on this occasion she was the only one who was
able to accept the invitation. The others had other plans that day.
I asked if she would still like to come and she said that she would
(although on earlier occasions when she had been invited, she was quite
reticent and shy about coming, even as part of a larger group). So I
went ahead and prepared lunch for two.