I am honored that the outstanding essayist and author Anthony Esolen has written a powerful op-ed for The Catholic Thing, "Blessed Be the Peacemaker," on why our culture needs the message of My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints.
Esolen begins:
When I was a small boy in grade school, we had no cartoons of naked men and women, boys and girls, strutting and slouching across the pages of “health” books. We had no sly suggestive come-ons into the world of porn and trivial sex. We were not encouraged to abuse ourselves, or given hints as to how many ways we could do it, or with whom. We did not know that our bodies were tools for mutual and meaningless seizing and consumption.Read the rest at The Catholic Thing.
We were not, in other words, the objects of massive, publicly sponsored, selfish, soul-flattening child abuse.
That is but one conclusion I’ve drawn from the remarkable and profoundly wise book by Dawn Eden, My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints. I don’t wish to give the impression that Dawn’s book is mainly condemnatory. It isn’t, not at all. She understands what it is to have your childhood torn from you, because of the selfishness or the heedlessness or the outright cruelty of adults. But she does not dwell upon old crimes. She does not tug at the scab to open it up and have it bleed afresh. She does not delight in exposing the evil.
Instead, she shows, in biographical meditations upon the lives of various saints, how people who have been hurt by those who should have loved them best can have peace, by hiding themselves in the wounds of the suffering Christ.
