Yamel is 42 and has been living in Spain for a decade. When she introduces herself, she picks out five things: “I’m Dominican, I’m a doctor, I have a son, I’m married, and, above all, I’m a daughter of God.”
Before moving to Oviedo, she had built a life in the Dominican Republic: a hospital post, a private practice, patients of her own. She and her husband met online, and their long-distance relationship grew from there.
They had a civil wedding in her home country, since he needed to be confirmed before they could marry in the Church. Once they moved to Spain, fresh obstacles got in the way of that church wedding: “It was one hurdle after another: first we were getting married, then we weren’t, and it just dragged on.”
Unable to receive Communion
“My heart felt empty,” Yamel says. Not being able to receive Communion weighed on her.
She arrived in Oviedo without any family nearby. “My only refuge was going to church.” She began attending Eucharistic adoration at her parish, and it was there that she met Lupe, a supernumerary of Opus Dei. One day, Lupe approached her and said she wanted to introduce her to a friend who was travelling to the Dominican Republic.
That was how she first came across Opus Dei. The first time she was invited to a gathering where other women met for formation, she walked in and burst into tears. “It was like seeing peace itself,” she says, “and all I could do was cry.” The memory still makes her smile: “There she was, introducing me to everyone, and I was just crying. I made quite a scene.”
When she told her husband she’d met people from Opus Dei, his first reaction was wary: “Be careful,” he warned her, “they’ll mess with your head and take your money.” But Yamel told him that hadn’t been her experience at all.
“God is the heart of marriage”
The church wedding came about with no planning whatsoever. One day, out for a walk in Oviedo, they popped into the Esclavas Chapel (of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart), as they often did. On the way out, her husband turned to her and said: “Why don’t we get married in the Church?” Without a second thought, Yamel took out her phone, and before they’d walked another block, the priest who would marry them already had the news.
Her mother couldn't be there, as the embassy refused her a visa. “I felt that emptiness because my family wasn’t there, but it didn’t make me sad because I felt so surrounded and supported.”
Yamel remembers exactly how she felt on her wedding day: “It was the same joy and the same flutter of nerves I’d had at my First Communion.” She thinks she knows why: “God is the heart of families, the heart of marriage, the heart of life. If God isn’t at the centre of our marriage, our lives, our family, nothing works.”
The wedding had effects nobody expected. Her husband’s parents hadn't been to Confession in over twenty years; they went back before the wedding and started attending Sunday Mass again. Her husband changed too: “There was more unity between us. We became more truly one.”
Ten years on
Today, Yamel is a supernumerary of Opus Dei herself. “Opus Dei is my family, my guide, my support. All those women I met are my sisters.”
These days, when her son tells her he wants to get married just like his parents did, Yamel feels the answer lies in that same certainty she found ten years ago.