Marriage retreat focuses on reconciliation

IC photo/Marie Mischel

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Jeannie and Bruce Hannemann present the Marriage Enrichment Retreat held March 7 at St. Thomas More Parish.

COTTONWOOD HEIGHTS — The parents of St. John the Baptist, Zechariah and Elizabeth, are models for married couples today. When Mary and Joseph visited them, Zechariah listened and Elizabeth offered encouragement.

“So in your marriages, you need to be Elizabeths, and you need to be Zechariahs to other young couples, but you also need an Elizabeth in your life, and you need a Zechariah in your life,” Jeannie Hannemann told those gathered for the March 7 “Reconciliation in Marriage” retreat at St. Thomas More Parish.

Married couples also must make Eucharistic Adoration a part of their lives, because “the only way a marriage can last through the big things that need reconciliation or the little everyday annoyances, is if we can live in that center where God is present within our relationship, where God is there between us,” said Jeannie Hannemann, who with her husband, Bruce, presented the marriage retreat, which was sponsored by the diocesan Office of Marriage and Family Life.

More than 20 couples attended the retreat; others gathered down the hall for a Marriage Encounter.

During the Hannemanns’ presentation, Bruce Hannemann spoke of impediments to intimacy, two of which are the difficulty of being authentic and vulnerable.

“Boy, don’t we want to not do that?” he asked. “We don’t want to be our real self sometimes; and we surely don’t want to be vulnerable to our spouses or to other people around us because ‘Gosh, they might know who I really am, they might know my weaknesses or whatever else it might be.’”

One of the hurdles to intimacy the Hannemanns faced was Bruce’s addiction to pornography, which began when he was 9, he said. The addiction deepened over the years, particularly when the Internet made pornography readily available, he said.

Statistics show that about 50 percent of Christian men and about 22 percent of women struggle with pornography, Jeannie Hannemann said.  

In the presentation, the Hannemanns discussed how brain chemistry changes because of addiction; Bruce Hannemann began a program based at Harvard University to exercise his brain and recover from his addiction.

Later in the presentation, Bruce Hannemann explained how brain chemistry affects how people handle conflict, and how that knowledge can help couples deal with issues in their marriage.

The couple also spoke of how their faith helped them heal their relationship.

“And now we have the marriage that God wants us to have, and every day it’s getting better, because it’s not perfect yet,” Jeannie Hannemann said.  

Satan does not want marriages to succeed, Jeannie Hannemann said, and she recommended that married couples say the St. Michael prayer at least three times a day to combat the devil. She also suggested that, when facing difficulties, they ask Jesus to help them to “pick up their mat and walk,” referring to the story in John 5.

At the root of any problem in a marriage is failure to “give yourself fully, faithfully, fruitfully and freely to your wife or your husband,” she said, and doing this requires daily commitment. Each person also needs to put God at the center of his or her life and then make a gift of themselves to their spouse, she said.

Throughout the retreat, those attending were asked to reflect on various aspects of their own lives, such as who act as “Elizabeths and Zechariahs” for them and what their “O God” moments have been. They also had occasions to join hands for moments of prayer.