Held in Your keeping my weakness is strength.

When our telephone conversation was interrupted yet another time, Vera laughed: "This is the evil one." It's true that my many attempts to contact the American foundress of the Courage Reparational Groups had often met mishap. I persevered only because it seemed like a good idea, as the same-sex "marriage" debate rages on, to talk to someone who had the straight goods on the subject or, in other words, someone who had been delivered from a life of lesbianism.

Vera, who doesn't wish her last name publicized because of her work as a pastoral counselor, hails from New York, and is candid about her former life only because the story of her subsequent conversion "gives glory to God." A "child of the sixties", she came of age when the hippie movement was gaining ascendancy, and while the hippies got a few things right, their belief that "you have to have sex, or you won't be integrated psychologically" was directly opposed to God's order. As for Vera, things were a bit more complicated, she admitted: while she "experimented" with boys and "felt normal in every way, I felt this need for women.... I have homosexual leanings."

The Church teaches that "it's not a sin to have the condition.... Things happen in life to cause the homosexual condition," Vera explained, adding, "God's mercy is very great for that person; it is a suffering." She views the homosexual orientation as "an extreme form of codependency" and, in fact, refers to it as "a homo-emotional" disorder. "I felt the need for women more than men emotionally when I was a teenager.... When I'm attracted to another woman, it's an inadequacy I see in myself, [it's a] deeper need of my own to be female."

Thus a crisis developed for Vera when, at 24, a close woman friend started dating a man. Vera was devastated, feeling "very hurt in my psyche." To make matters worse, she lost her job. She was spiraling into a deep depression, when she agreed to accompany her aunt to a charismatic prayer meeting, where, as she was prayed over in front of the Blessed Sacrament, she felt healed and loved: "I just knew Jesus was there."

Vera's subsequent formation in the faith took place both within the lay community Anawim (Hebrew for "remnant") and within the support group Courage, formed by Fr. John Harvey in the early 80s, to assist Catholics with homosexual leanings to hold fast to teachings of the Church. Members are encouraged to form chaste friendships, and battle self-absorption by helping each other. They follow a 12-step program similar to that of Alcoholics Anonymous, and frankly, Vera says, "chastity is like sobriety.... We're not meant to be intoxicated in relationships."

Vera speaks about the "theology of weakness" and you have to think that any program based on AA, the grand-daddy of all self-help groups, could not but lead to such a theology. The first three steps are really a manual for the acquisition of humility: one, you admit that you are powerless (over whatever vice, addiction, disorder, or affliction holds you in thrall); two, you come to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity; and three, you make a decision to turn your will and your life over to the care of God as you understand Him.

But her "theology of weakness" is also the fruit of Vera's own difficult earthly pilgrimage. She sought perfection but in yam: "I saw that that wasn't happening, even in my own embrace of the spiritual life." Who came to her aid was none other than St. Therese of Lisieux. "Her spirituality was an embrace of her weakness.... She had to deal with a lot of suffering in her emotions." St. Therese herself observed that "the problem lies not in the fact of our littleness and poverty, but that we don't accept it."

"God is not scandalized by our weakness," Vera said, "He loves us, no matter what we did." Whereas the surrounding culture tends to value power and autonomy, these concepts are incompatible with spiritual growth, the beginning of which is to humble yourself before God, admitting your complete dependence on Him. If you keep yourself "outside the radar of God" until you feel decent enough to come before him, "you're keeping grace at bay."

Vera had been involved with Courage for about ten years when she felt "a deeper vocational" call. She began the Courage Reparational Groups, an endeavour ultimately blessed by the late Cardinal John O'Connor of New York. "God doesn't live in a vacuum," she said, "He wants to draw people into His life." The members of the Reparational group meet regularly to pray before the Blessed Sacrament, to "come before God in repentance, in dependency; we have this struggle, the homo-emotional struggle, we're uniting it with his Passion."

At the same time, members of the Courage Reparational groups have to be wary of becoming "self-righteous" she adds. "We're praying for our brothers and sisters who have the same condition that we have; we can't judge; nobody can judge." The struggle is ongoing. Vera can find herself, "attracted to someone, I'd be fooling around with it or playing with it in my head." To remain faithful in prayer requires diligence (she tries to make a holy hour every day). "You have to make an effort most days, you have to pull yourself into silence. God's language is silence."

She would answer those who insist that homosexual persons have the right to "marriage" with the truth that "God has an order", that "lust kills the soul," and that "real love is sacrificial, it's a giving, a losing of yourself," and ultimately a union with Christ himself on the cross. Or, as a priest once defined it, she laughed: "When you can scrub a floor without a bit of resentment, that's love."

Lianne Laurence writes from Burnaby, BC, and is the author of the fascinating book Borowski: A Canadian Paradox.