Finding Joy in your Daily Call: Book Recommendations for Newlyweds
/DOMINIKA RAMOS
When I got engaged a month before I turned twenty-one, some family members were concerned that I didn't know what I was getting into.
PHOTOGRAPHY: DESIGNS BY JESSINA
They were worried that I had my head in the clouds about the way the administrative details of my future life would shake out. Maybe it was because I had dragged my feet to do basic things like get my driver's license or because my only jobs had been babysitting and tutoring. I don't know.
Whatever the reason may be, they needn't have worried. Those details of life--the applying for jobs and paying bills and adulting--were bumpy for me to get a handle on and bumpy still for me to juggle (especially now that I've got to keep track of three extra people's doctors appointments and shoe sizes).
Yet the hardest part of marriage has been thinking my vocation lies on the other side of that daily muck of life.
It is tremendously easy to get lost in the maintenance of daily life and to let temporal anxieties loom large and rob me of my peace.
I have often fallen into the trap of thinking things like: if I just stayed at home instead of spending ten hours a week commuting I could create the most beautiful domestic church, if I could just get away from my kids and make a holy hour, I could live a more faithful life, or if I could just use my creative gifts instead of keeping people fed and clothed then I could be who I'm meant to be.
I suspect we commonly enter into marriage with this particular weakness for chasing peace in any place other than the present moment precisely because engagement is an intense period of waiting. You can easily spend that time in a state of imagining and dreaming up what the joys of marriage and children will look like. But then you come to marriage with a world of images and dreams overlaying and competing with the reality of joy shaken and stirred with monotony, frustration, exhaustion, and general human failing.
But as St. Josemaría Escrivá wisely once noted, "the secret of married happiness lies in everyday things, not in daydreams." The reality of your vocation is all day every day and not on fringes of a difficult work day, whenever you can get a break from the onslaught of needs from toddlers, or in thinking up all the potential restructurings of work and family life balance.
So I'd like to offer a few sources of profound yet practical wisdom for the newlywed (or not-so-newlywed) struggling like I have with uniting my attention to the reality of the present moment and finding real joy in my vocation, regardless of, and indeed more often through, the responsibilities of my day.
Practical Mysticism
Evelyn Underhill was a 20th century Anglican writer and a gifted spiritual director. Harboring a lifelong attraction to Catholicism, she is known especially for her writing on Christian mysticism and spirituality in which she draws deeply upon the works of figures such as St. Teresa of Avila, St. Augustine, and St. John of the Cross.
This slim volume insists that mysticism is for everyone, not those of superior intellect or those who regularly levitate away in angelic ecstasies. Underhill defines mysticism as "the art of union with Reality," and few things have helped me more to alleviate the pressures of playing the comparison game (both on social media and in real life) and to plumb the extraordinary riches of my ordinary life than this book.
He Leadeth Me
I will forever be grateful to the fellow teacher/mama friend who lent me this life-changing book when she saw me drowning in the all-consuming emotional and mental toll of first year teaching and working mom life.
Servant of God, Fr. Walter Ciszek, recounts how he suffered at the hands of Soviet forces for four years in solitary confinement and then fifteen years of hard labor in a Siberian Gulag. But what makes this gripping tale so pertinent for this wife and mom are the spiritual lessons Ciszek shares.
His witness impressed on me the important truth that God's will for me consists of the 24 hours of this day, the people I encounter this day, and the work of this day. His will is not my anxieties over the past or future, what people think about me, or the distractions I can pour into when I'm irritated with the situation at hand.
Holiness for Housewives
St. Josemaría Escrivá also wisely once said that "those who are called to the married state will, with the grace of God, find within their state everything they need to be holy," and Dom Hubert Van Zeller's short, direct book is kind of handbook expounding on these words.
Van Zeller writes: "The greatest pleasures in life are not those that are superimposed--any more than they are those that represent escapes. The greatest and most lasting pleasures are those that emerge out of life itself. They are those that come in virtue of the vocation, not in spite of it." Van Zeller reminds me that authentic happiness comes not from the glass of wine and the episode (or three) of my current favorite show at the end of a long day, but from the marrow of my vocation--from making a gift of self to the people God has chosen for me even when it's hard.
I hope you find wisdom and strength in these books to faithfully, joyfully carry out the responsibilities of your day.
For, indeed, it's in the unseen, often immobile work of sitting on hold trying to pay bills or sitting up with a sick child at two am or sitting in traffic on your daily commute that you vitally participate in building up the kingdom of God.
