The Importance of Reading Good Literature as a Catholic Couple
/DOMINIKA RAMOS
Do you read stories together as a couple?
PHOTOGRAPHY: Kaitlyn Heacock Photography
Spiritual reading and self-help books have obvious benefits and can spur on fruitful conversations, but I find we often overlook the power of reading good literature.
On one level, sharing a story aloud itself simply fosters intimacy. Reading aloud and listening require you to slow down and pay attention to another person's experience.
But reading fiction also offers a dimension of exclusivity and playfulness--together you imaginatively enter into the lives of characters in worlds far removed from your own, and you return from that experience each time with a sense that you've shared a journey unique to the two of you.
Perhaps even more so than you'd find with marital self-help books, the emotional quality of great literature can reveal the drama of our own hearts. In worlds as distant as medieval Italy or Regency England or Middle-Earth, it's heartening to come across and live briefly and vicariously through characters who contend with the same kind of doubts and hopes that we have, and it's heartening too to witness your spouse experience those revelations.
As C.S. Lewis puts it, "in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."
Related: 4 Secular Novels Featuring Insights into Authentic Love + Catholic Marriage
Stories also enrich the intellectual life you share with your spouse. W.H. Auden once wrote of our difficulty in making sense of the human experience as a result of "our poverty of symbols." Reading great literature with your spouse allows you both to inherit the poets' expansive world of symbols and allusions with which to make greater sense of life together.
When my husband and I feel weighed down by family and work obligations, we tend to function a bit robotically with one another. It feels as though our shared imagination contracts and our common vision of the world becomes murkier.
In these seasons, I find it far more tempting to just soak myself in blue light each night catching up on my latest TV binge or scrolling on endless bite-sized snapshots of other people's lives. But putting aside my phone and spending even fifteen minutes in the evening to read aloud to one another from great works of literature lifts our eyes out of our immediate circumstances to a bigger picture of the cosmos.
We come back feeling connected with one another, relieved from some of the stress in our lives, and endowed with more perspective for our own small story in this world.
