Praying for Joy in our Poverty: Battling Desolation in Tough Seasons

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

I recently had a conversation with a friend on the fair division of labor in marriage. 

I had to keep from laughing as for the past five months my husband and I have been living long distance due to a career transition we've made. Our division of labor looks like me doing absolutely everything on the list of things the marriage gurus tell you that you should divide up. 

And for the previous year, we were in a completely unfeasible situation of my husband working multiple jobs so I could stay at home with the kids--including a fresh newborn. I did nearly every night time wake up with the baby and put all the kids to bed most nights on top of the normal tasks of cooking and cleaning.

If I wasn't armed with a sense of humor, it would be easy for my thoughts to turn sour every time I heard conventional marriage and child rearing advice for married couples in conventional circumstances. 

And sometimes my thoughts do turn sour. Once after hearing the oft-repeated advice for burnt-out moms to "ask for help," I wanted to scream. As if asking the question would make a fairy godmother appear who would lift my burdens.

Yet amidst all the non-applicable advice, an incredibly moving way I've heard to contend with extreme circumstances is to pray for "joy in our poverty."

Any kind of extremity, financial, emotional, physical and so on, is a type of poverty, a lack of something essential. So this prayer is a challenge to my automatic response to difficulty of simply gritting my teeth and soberly, rather than joyfully, enduring.

And surprise, surprise the prayer doesn't make me instantly joyful. I still battle crankiness and desolation on a daily basis. But it's a continual reminder to me that my marriage and my life is a gift.

Too often it feels as though marriage is a gift in the abstract. Of course the sacrament of marriage is a gift, but not today, not when I'm a thousand miles away from my husband and my children are all conspiring to push me to the outer limits of my sanity. God clearly meant it to be a gift and only meant me to experience joy when we're making memories and getting along.

But our God is a God who emptied Himself out and became a visible image of poverty on the Cross whence He made all joy possible.

And so this prayer, short and sweet as it is, grounds me in reality and reminds me that our difficulties are not incidental, but part of the life in which God has placed me and my family to become holy.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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The Importance of Reading Good Literature as a Catholic Couple

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

Do you read stories together as a couple? 

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.

Looking for your next read-aloud book with your spouse? Check out Spoken Bride’s Recommended Reading Archives.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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Discerning your Secondary Vocation

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

Do you have ideas of what your role as a wife in marriage should look like? 

PHOTOGRAPHY: Matthew Lomanno

PHOTOGRAPHY: Matthew Lomanno

I've never believed that all women's lives should look a certain way, but I certainly had ideas of what my day-to-day duties as a wife and mother would look like. I was surprised, then, to find God calling me more than once to relinquish my expectations and to realize that his daily calling for me within the life-long vocation of marriage was something that could change.

What helped me most was coming to a fuller understanding of the Catholic Church's beliefs about vocations. The Church sees vocation on three levels: the universal call to holiness, then the primary vocation, and lastly the secondary vocation. 

Through baptism every Christian is given the universal call to holiness. The primary vocation is an individual's calling to marriage, religious life, or consecrated single life. The secondary vocation more specifically makes up your day-to-day life: your job, the way you use your gifts and talents in service of God, the volunteer opportunities you pursue and so on.

The distinction between the three is important, because when we conflate them, we can get rigid and inaccurate ideas about how we should live. 

Too often it can be tempting to listen to loud voices declaring that a faithful Catholic wife stays at home with her children, homeschools, and makes home cooked meals from scratch. Or on the flipside, other voices cry out that if there is any desire in her heart for a dream outside of the home, then not following that desire is denying herself in an essential and unhealthy way.

Neither of these extremes are dogmatic, and when they are taken as such, they can cause needless anxiety. The reality, in my own life, has been far more nuanced. 

I have lived out the secondary vocation within my primary vocation of marriage in many different ways.

I've worked both full-time and part-time outside the home. I've stayed home full time, and I've worked from home. I've sent my kids to daycare, and I've also spent every minute of the day with them. I've recently begun homeschooling my oldest, but perhaps some day I'll send him and his siblings to a brick and mortar school.

I've worked in jobs that did not suit my charisms at all (looking at you, customer service). And I've lived through seasons where the day-to-day tasks that comprise my secondary vocation have been far more fitting for my gifts: lecturing on literature or reading aloud to a preschooler.

And in all seasons there has been sacrifice. In all seasons, my husband and I have had to ask ourselves if the way we've structured our lives is contributing to peace in us as individuals and in our family as a whole, and if not, if there is something we can change to better serve one another.

The longer I've been married, the more I've realized how impermanent the circumstances of day-to-day life can be and how crucial it is to be attentive to the voice of the Holy Spirit in order to not become too attached to the kind of life we've built or the one we desire. 

Related: Exercising Discernment Through Seasons of Life

I've learned that, while it's ideal for our daily work to align with our particular charisms, there are seasons where, for the good of our family, we may have to sacrifice the work we want for the work we must do.

How, then, do you become adept at discerning your secondary vocation? I'm still learning, but here are a few things that have helped me:

Learn from the wisdom of others

Take advantage of the wisdom shared by those who have walked with many people through the same decisions you have to make. Reading a book like What's Your Decision: An Ignatian Approach to Decision Making or Jacques Phillipe's In the School of the Holy Spirit has been particularly helpful for me.

Talk to your spouse

Having regular, honest conversations with your spouse are crucial. It's so easy to go on auto-pilot under the duress of work and family life, that we can fail to see our spouse drowning or vice versa.

Make prayer a priority

We cannot listen to the noise of Catholic media personalities more than the time we spend with God Himself and expect to have clarity in our lives. Spend time with Christ in Adoration, meditate upon His Word, contemplate the mysteries of His life in the Rosary. The goal of this life, the one our secondary vocation should be directed towards, is ultimately to share in God's divine life for all eternity. We cannot do this if we do not know Him.

Discernment doesn't end once we've said "I do" and slipped the ring on our beloved's finger. It never ends, because conversion never ends. 

Understanding God's individual call to us for how we must live out our daily lives is something we must engage in constantly, individually and as a couple.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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Make Time for What Matters | Tips for Setting Priorities as a Family

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

Here's what I expected marriage to look like: a home full of beauty and order, a daily shared prayer life, involvement in ministries at our parish, evenings spent reading great literature together, and setting deep roots in our local community of family and friends.

Here's what I did not expect: evenings spent consuming tv shows, weeks or months sometimes between seeing friends, parish hopping on Sundays because we're running late...again, a home full of clutter and chaos, a an inconsistent shared prayer life (and, truth be told, an inconsistent private prayer life).

While the highlights reel of social media might give the idea that we're living out the first vision I had for our marriage, we far too often fall into the second picture.

Why, when my husband and I both highly value faith, community, beauty, and art, don't we always live like we want to?

The values that we share with our spouses are ultimately what propel us into marriage and fuel our desire to grow a family and a life together. But if we don’t couple those values with reflection and practical resolutions, they will never take root to ground our marriages. They will recede into the background as ideals we once hoped for and dream that perhaps someday we'll incorporate into our lives.

When I got married, I kept waiting for such things as our prayer life and our involvement in our community to spontaneously take off. Now after seven years of marriage, I know that if we don't set aside time to discuss what is important to us and make a plan to prioritize those things, we'll live a reactive life dictated by whatever is stressing us out and whatever is most convenient.

There are many ways both casual and more formal to have these discussions and make these kinds of resolutions. Here are some ideas for getting started:

Write a Family Mission Statement

A family mission statement is a description of who you are and what direction you want to go in. It doesn't have to be lengthy but if the effort is thoughtful, a family mission statement will be a constant reminder of those values you want informing your family life. 

Read more: Finding your Family's Mission

Create a Family Rule 

Creating a rule of life seems to have taken off in popularity lately, but the practice has its origins in early Christian monastic communities, and the clarity it brings makes it a worthwhile practice for all Christians. A family rule is more elaborate than a family mission statement as the first succinctly sums up your identity as a family, while the latter gets into the details of how you will live out your goals and values.

Read more: What Married Couples Can Learn from the Rhythms of Religious Communities

Read formational books

Check out books such as Patrick Lencioni's Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family and Steven Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families. These books give families the resources to stop living reactively and start living purposefully.

Whatever your family values include--good conversation, traveling, gardening, music, nature, athletics, board games--building a family culture around those values is only possible to the extent that we intentionally plan for it.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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His Will is Our Hiding Place: Marriage Wisdom in Corrie Ten Boom's Memoir

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

My husband and I celebrated seven years of marriage in May, and on my wedding day if you had asked me what our lives would look like seven years in, I would have predicted that we'd be a lot more settled and a lot more competent at marriage and parenting. 

By seven years, we'd definitely have things figured out.

I couldn't have anticipated just how exhausting the work of parenting small children is (let it be noted, I couldn't have anticipated the joys of it either). I couldn't have fathomed the world of invisible special needs we're now navigating for one of our children. I couldn't have foreseen all the career swerves we'd take and the consequential life-transition-whiplash we'd find ourselves in again and again. And I think I'd be surprised by just how far we've still got to go in learning how to love each other and our children well.

Sometimes it feels like we could have strategized our lives a little better.

I feel this particularly in regards to the winding career paths we've taken, but if I'm honest, on the hardest days at home with small kids, I've wondered if we should have waited a little longer to start a family or spaced our kids out a little more.

I found a lot of wisdom and solace in my own life in Corrie Ten Boom's memoir The Hiding Place, in which she describes her and her family's involvement in the Dutch resistance during WWII.

The title refers to the hidden room in their home where Corrie, her sister, and her father sheltered Jewish men and women from persecution. The title also refers to God's will. Corrie and her sister, Betsie were ultimately sent to a concentration camp where her sister died from illness. Corrie, herself, was released due to a clerical error. Had she stayed, she would have been killed with the other women in her age group a week later.

Corrie wonders at the timing of all this--that she is saved and her sister is spared a worse death than the one she endured. She writes,

"There are no “ifs” in God’s kingdom. I could hear [Betsie's] soft voice saying it. His timing is perfect. His will is our hiding place. Lord Jesus, keep me in Your will! Don’t let me go mad by poking about outside it."

At another point Corrie reflects on how startling it is that these world events came crashing in on their quiet lives and required them to choose between living in safety or to protect innocent life. She doesn't see the two disparate circumstances as unconnected: "this is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see."

Corrie's words and witness brings me comfort in my marriage. Her prayers have become my prayers. Even in a life free of the kind of dangers that Corrie and family faced, we still must make choices and live with those choices without wondering about the what ifs.

Standing here seven years in, I can't know what our future holds no matter how much expert strategizing we do for it, but I do know that if we have discerned well, then Corrie's words are true: "that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do."


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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Confronting Mental Temptations in Your Relationship

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

I recently heard a talk by Sr. Anna Marie McGuan, RSM, on her podcast Scripture and the Spiritual Life entitled "Cultivating the Interior Life" in which she made a crucial distinction between your self and your thoughts.

PHOTOGRAPHY: DESIGNS BY JESSINA

PHOTOGRAPHY: DESIGNS BY JESSINA

Perhaps it's surprising to hear that your interior life is not synonymous with your thoughts or imagination. In fact, your thoughts don't always originate from yourself, and Sr. Anna Marie refers to a particular type of thought, the logismoi, as being sent by Satan himself.

In marriage diabolic thoughts, or logismos, might look like: "Why is her life easier? Must be nice that her husband makes enough money to let her stay home (or go on fancy vacations or afford private school)" Or "We'll never be on the same page about faith or parenting. Why didn't I see this before we were married? Our kids are headed for disaster as grownups!" Or "What would my life look like if I hadn't gotten married? I could have followed that dream and I might have had a more fulfilling life." Or "Why do I always get emotional when we fight? I'm so sensitive and dumb." And so on.

They can be disturbing like adulterous images or they can seem entirely reasonable which, Sr. Anna Marie notes, are the most dangerous thoughts of all.

Wherever we have a weakness, the devil can take it and use it to lead us away from the truth.

And these thoughts, rooted in envy, despair, anger, and so forth, are not ones most of us would readily admit to entertaining, especially when people around you--friends or social media personalities--never reveal that they've had negative thoughts about their marriages. Consequently, if the primary image you form about everyone else's marriages is that they are never tempted to doubt or imagine their lives differently, you might be filled with self-loathing when you do experience those thoughts.

But the fact is, if you've ever experienced detracting thoughts about your marriage, you are not evil. You are human. Everyone has them. If not about marriage, then certainly in some other sphere of their life.

As Sr. Anna Marie points out, these thoughts do not say something objective about who you are or the state of your interior life. They are temptations. And when the logismoi pops into your mind, you haven't actually sinned. You are only accountable to the extent that you accept it and subsequently indulge in it.

How then, do we battle these intrusive thoughts?

Sr. Anna Marie describes the interior life as the heart, not the organ, but the deep heart, the inner man, the place of encounter with God, and the only way to cultivate the life therein and to build defenses against mental temptations is through self-awareness and prayer.

Self-awareness entails identifying which thoughts are diabolic triggers. We have to spend time reflecting about our thought patterns and what mental paths they threaten to lead us down. A nightly examen prayer is a good way to start taking notice of the life of our minds.

And prayer itself is a defense against the logismoi because it's a channel of God's grace in us. In prayer, we are given the peace of God's own triune life that is so distant from the panic of the logismos.

One highly practical form of prayer that Sr. Anna Marie suggests is the Jesus prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner." This advice has transformed my own prayer life. Any time I'm tempted by a logismoi, I slow my breathing and say the Jesus prayer. It functions on multiple levels: the name of Christ is power against evil, and I'm reminded of who I am--someone in need of healing. It's both defense and solace.

Exposing the logismos for what they are and turning to God's mercy in prayer, rather than being distracted by the chaos and shame Satan wants to ensnare me in, wipes clean my interior vision. And this simplifying of attention makes me freer to see the mission of my marriage more clearly and love my spouse more purely.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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Meaningful and Budget-Friendly Wedding Gifts for Catholic Couples

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

During my college and newlywed years, I always scanned friends' wedding registries for that perfect gift that seemed both personal and also wouldn't cost me a small fortune. 

Even now I'm in no position to buy someone their longed-for Le Creuset dishware set and I wince when I find everything within my budget has been already purchased.

But I've found both as a recipient and giver of many wedding gifts that some of the best gifts are not listed on the registry at all but come from deeply personal and out-of-the-box thinking:

Handwritten advice

One good friend asked older married couples she knew to write us letters with marriage advice. We read the stack of them on our honeymoon which made for an encouraging and practical start to our marriage.

Book Bouquet

Another friend gifted me Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed as part of a bachelorette party gift which has since inspired me with one of my favorite ideas for an off-beat and affordable gift: a book bouquet--that is, a stack of books tied up with ribbon.  

There are several used book websites where lots of great books fall in the under $5 range, and the possibilities are delightfully endless. 

You could do spiritual books like Fulton Sheen's Three to Get Married and John Paul II's Love and Responsibility, great literature like Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina, collections of love poems, or lighthearted mysteries featuring couples like Agatha Christie's married sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence, or Dorothy Sayers' inimitable duo, Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. You could also find a beautiful coffee table book related to the bride or groom's interests and pair it with some thrifted favorites.

Check out some other recommended reading for Catholic brides and newly married couples here.

Honey Mead

A wedding gift I often give is a bottle of honey mead. The origin of the term 'honeymoon' comes from the custom of couples drinking honey mead during the first month of their marriage for good luck. But there's a spiritual significance here too as St. Valentine, patron of happy marriages, is also a patron of beekeepers.

A Unique Twist on a Spiritual Bouquet

Lastly, the most appreciated gift we received for our wedding were prayers. A couple of our guests wrote out incredibly thoughtful and detailed spiritual bouquets for us, and I've loved thinking of how many graces were sent with us into our marriage thanks to their prayers. 

A fun idea is to pair a spiritual bouquet with some seed packets. Many flowers or herbs are attached with spiritual legends and meanings, and at the same time, you can help a couple get started on a Mary garden or a windowsill herb garden.

Whatever your situation in life, these suggestions work as stand-alone gifts or pair well with something traditionally off the registry, but in my case, it's been these kinds of thoughtful and creative gifts that have held the dearest place in my heart.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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Don't Take Your Spouse for Granted | Practical Tips for a Healthy Marriage

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

A couple years ago I was talking with a woman who had a beautiful marriage and had raised a large brood of wonderful children. And I was like, "Okay, tell me the secret formula. Tell me the tips. Tell me the list of marriage and parenting books for success."

And she just laughed and said the fact I desired to have a good marriage and raise good children was a sign I was going in the right direction. I think my interior response was something like, "No really, I know you've got a ten-step program to holy married life tucked up your sleeve. Spill the beans, lady."

But she did say something that both surprised and helped me: never consider yourselves past the possibility of divorce. In other words, never take your marriage for granted. When stated in the latter terms, it sounds like clichéd marriage advice. When stated in the former terms, it's startling and perhaps affronts our Catholic sensibilities. After all, for devout couples who entered their marriages seriously, fully assenting to its character as an inviolable sacrament, the possibility of divorce seems absurdly far-fetched.

But around this same time, I heard another friend, who had been married a few years longer than us, say that she knew couples, faithful Catholic couples whose weddings she had been a bridesmaid in, who were now getting divorced. And that also startled me.

This is not to say that divorce is never the answer. The church, in her wisdom, allows it in such cases as abuse out of respect for the dignity of the victim. But in otherwise healthy marriages, it can be easy, I think, to consider your marriage too holy to be impervious to the wear and tear of sin and then to find you've slipped into a vipers' nest of presumption and resentment.

So how can we, practically speaking, not take our marriages for granted?

Pray together. 

Not as a vague resolution but as a scheduled thing. The morning office or even just a morning offering. A daily or weekly examen. Spending ten or fifteen minutes reading Scripture or another spiritual work together and discussing. Any one of these can be a fruitful way of knowing what's on your spouse's heart.

Pray for each other. 

When I remember, I like to say the noon Angelus for my husband because it's right at the height of the workday and I especially like novenas because they can be like tiny pilgrimages you undertake for someone. There are also many days when I say very short prayers and make small sacrifices for my husband's sake. As a result, I feel more closely united to him and am far more likely to have a tender-hearted response over the irksome things that are simply part of doing life with another person.

Read more: Creative Ways to Pray for your Spouse

Be attentive to their needs

Ask your spouse, "How can I help you today?" When my husband asks me this, I often find it's the question itself and not even the act of service that lightens my emotional load, because it shows the interest he takes in me and my daily life.

Avoid shaming. 

Shame is such an immobilizing force. When do we ever elicit kindness from someone when we heap blame on their head? When do we ever feel light enough to pick ourselves up and do good when we're mired in the heaviness of shame. A sense of humor and a sense of reality--we're all human, we all fail--fosters the peace and openness needed in marriage.

Seek counsel.

Go to marriage counseling or to spiritual direction. I know of a couple, whose marriage is ostensibly not in crisis mode, yet who go to regular counseling as "marriage insurance." Brilliant.

In my pre-married life, I imagined marriage as a kind of promised land of easy peace and fulfillment. But marriage is an invitation to a continual process of conversion which, while hard, is also infinitely more beautiful than a life free of demands. If we cooperate with God, we will be changed and stripped of our idols, thus becoming Christ-bearers to those within and beyond the walls of our homes.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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Short Prayers for Catholic Couples to Know

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

As marriage is a living sign of the love of the Trinity, it's no surprise that the devil wages war directly against it.

Of course that's evident in the culture at large, but it's true, too, that if in our Christian marriages, we aren't vigilant about our daily attitudes to one another and if we aren't making concrete resolutions to love each other better, the enemy will work insidiously against us.

In my case, the wedding day felt like a spiritual triumph of graces and a kind of crowning event at the end of our college days in a robust Catholic community. But the farther I've gotten from that day and the more careworn I've become with the duties of work and family, the easier it has been for me to become lax in my prayer life, to feel as though I'm merely being tossed about by the conditions of my life, and to let resentment creep in.

This spiritual stupor can happen almost imperceptibly, and when I realize it is taking hold, I know I need to do something immediately. 

Reception of the sacraments, speaking to a good friend, and taking a step away from my husband and children for an hour or two (or even a revitalizing ten minutes in a hot shower) to get some perspective and appreciation are all incredibly helpful, but the following short prayers have been the ones I go when I need something really quick for a shift in my mind and my heart:

Visita, Quaesumus, Domine

Lord, we beg you to visit this house and banish from it all the deadly power of the enemy. May your holy angels dwell here to keep us in peace and may your blessing be upon us always.

The Memorare to St. Joseph

Remember, O most pure spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, my great protector, Saint Joseph, that no one ever had recourse to your protection, or implored your aid without obtaining relief. Confiding therefore in your goodness, I come before you. Do not turn down my petitions, foster father of the Redeemer, but graciously receive them. Amen.

The St. Michael the Archangel Prayer

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

And lastly, when I don't have the energy to summon up the words even to say one of the above prayers, I find it grounding to simply focus on calm breathing and to repeat the name of Jesus.

These prayers, these words that are not my own, cut through my internal noise and remind me that Christ resides not in a far off place I can only reach when I'm well-put together, but that he's always abiding with me especially in my weakness and heaviness of heart, freely offering his grace, and gently inviting me to be a monstrance of his love to those in my home.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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Marriage as a School of Love: How our Vocations Educate and Enlighten

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

What does it mean that marriage is a school of love? 

When I was engaged the phrase seemed lovely and poetic but vague to me. Maybe it was also my allergy to well-meaning but grave voices warning me that marriage was "hard work" that made me gloss over this term, "school of love." 

As far as I was concerned, my fiancé was easy to love and so I assumed that marriage would be a school in the sense that my favorite subjects growing up were part of school--delightful and easy to pass.

Lo and behold, marriage actually is hard work, but rather than the drudgery those well-meaning voices made me envision, when we've integrated our hearts and minds with God's will, the work of marriage is enlivening. It's only until I was in the thick of marriage experiencing this kind of formative work that the term "school of love" took on substance and became a valuable framework for my vocation.

The following list outlines some aspects I've found helpful in thinking of my vocation in the language of education:

Everything is formation

Marriage and everything within it is not linear. You don't always progress nicely in peace and virtue and happiness. 

I expected the sweetness of babies but not the accompanying anxiety, the hilarity of toddlers but not the defeating frustration. I had no conception of how fraught decisions concerning careers or family size would be. 

And I never expected God would wrench away and destroy my ideas of what kind of wife and mother I would be and then simply ask me to love my children, love my spouse, and love Him more than my dreams of self. 

But the periods of difficulty and the questions that have no easy answers are all meant to form me. As I stumble along struggling and feeling irritated or even desolate, I'm given, often unwittingly, the grace to grow in patience, fortitude, and trust.

Humility is a prerequisite for learning

When I taught literature I would urge my students to divest themselves of their assumptions about a work before we read it. There's no room for learning if you've already made up your mind one way or another. 

The same goes for marriage. 

There's no real end to how much you can learn about, understand, or love another person. So I've found it to be a best practice to approach the people God has given me in the gift of this vocation with a generous dose of gratitude and at all times to be willing to have my presuppositions upended and to grow in directions I never expected.

A good teacher can make all the difference

Over the years, my marriage mentors have included other married friends, spiritual writers, confessors, and a slew of incisive novelists

There's nothing like someone sharing with you that they've been where you are and have lived through whatever hard thing you're going through. There's nothing like the wisdom of someone who has a strong understanding of human nature, can look at your life with an objective eye, and can lend practical advice. 

This is perhaps the one bit of advice I reuse most frequently for friends who are getting married or starting families--find good mentors.

You are both a student and a teacher

This notion struck me fresh as I sat in line for confession glancing over the examination of conscience handout one day. Down the list I read the question: Have I neglected the intellectual and spiritual needs of my spouse and children? 

Of course it's obvious to me that I'm supposed to be a student in this school of love, and I am aware that my husband and I are the primary teachers of our children. But something about the wording of that line imbued with extra heft the imperative to foster intellectual and spiritual growth in our home. 

Moreover, it made me realize how interconnected the learning is. The more I learn to become an instrument in God's hands and the more I learn to see my spouse and children as God does, the better I can identify and attend to their spiritual and intellectual needs.

There's a line from Cormac McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses that comes back to me each time I see someone get married: "It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all." That sounds dismal, but there's a truth to it. 

Seven years ago, if I could have peered into my life now I would have trembled over all the lack of sleep and difficult decisions waiting for us. I imagine if I could peer into my life seven years hence I might tremble all the more for whatever lies in wait. 

But as one of my wise married friends says: "there's no grace for hypothetical situations." It's only because of the grace we've received and the formation we've undergone through these years in this school of love that makes it possible to say yes to what we are asked in this present moment and whatever will be asked of us for the rest of our lives.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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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

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.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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The Transcendent Beauty of Ordinary Love

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

Once I heard an older acquaintance remark how she and her friends had such great plans for their lives in high school, but then they just grew up, got married, and had babies.

That won't be me, I thought. I'll get married and have babies and accomplish all my creative dreams. But life hasn't turned out exactly that way.

I got married two weeks after my college graduation. I had spent the previous semester not job hunting but working on my undergraduate thesis and wedding planning. 

After we returned from the honeymoon, I had to find a job, any job, so I took on a customer service position at an eye doctor's office. 

As I snapped pictures of people's retinas and failed dreadfully at small-talk, I thought about friends who were blazing through their masters' programs, doing mission work abroad, or beginning professions in fields they were passionate about.

It left me feeling a bit deflated--here I was, not using my English degree, not disciplined enough to pursue my dreams of writing in the evenings, and, let's face it, as a Catholic newly-wed with a blithe sense of natural family planning, likely to have a baby sooner rather than later who would then upset any individual ambitions I was harboring.

Before my five month stint in the world of healthcare was up, I was indeed pregnant. And while there was much I looked forward to in motherhood, there was an attitude I couldn't shake that between me and my due date was a countdown to the end of time I could call my own. 

As I waited for that baby to arrive, I feared that my life story, too, would be that I grew up, got married, and just had babies.

Well, I wasn't wrong about being robbed of my time. The baby made basic tasks about as easy as walking up an escalator backwards and blindfolded. 

And perhaps the life story I once feared will remain true, but motherhood transformed my perspective and made it so that I don't fear that life story.

I didn't just become a mother in some general sense, but to a particular person. Just as falling in love with a particular person, my Joe, buoyed me over any hesitation I had toward marriage, so too did this little boy with his lamb-like cries, delicate frame, and arresting gaze, my Leo, shatter my hesitations over any tedium in motherhood. 

I wasn't expecting to be stunned by the beauty of even the most menial tasks of caring for another human being. And yet those tasks frankly were menial, and getting married and having a baby is still a conventional path. 

When I became a mother, I recalled a professor of mine noting that falling in love is so extraordinary an experience precisely because it is so common--that everyone from a supermodel to the girl next door can be engulfed in that ennobling sentiment of love makes it all the more meaningful. 

And having my son filled me with a like awareness--that the mysteries of motherhood have indelibly marked the lives of so many women from time immemorial is strikingly profound.

In my individual vocation as "the queen of our castle" as my now five-year-old puts it, I go beyond myself in a symbolic way. 

Through the dress and veil I wore on my wedding day, through the rings I will wear all the days of my marriage, and through the body that has carried and nurtured my children, I, with every wife and mother that has ever lived, make visible these mysteries of life and love--mysteries that point to the ultimate mystery of God.

Yet while it is illuminating to be aware of how, through my very being, I body forth a bridal dignity, it's also haunting to be aware that all those brides and mothers throughout history that I am linked with have been largely forgotten in time. 

Their bodies--those very bodies they loved and mothered with, those bodies they quite literally carried history forward with--have turned to dust, and so too will mine.

Even this unsettling thought of being forgotten has become redeemed for me though. 

Early in my marriage, I read the novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, in which a friar, Brother Junipero, tries to discover why God would permit the sudden death of seven people in the collapse of a bridge. Neither Brother Junipero nor his author can logically answer for the ways of God. Instead the reader is left with this observation:

"We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

To do the work of love all the days of our life without the consolation of knowing that we will be remembered here on earth is something that requires courage and faith. 

To build up with your spouse what in your child's eyes is a kingdom and in the world's eyes something as ephemeral as a sandcastle is to live in hope.

 As Wilder suggests, love is the only intelligible force amidst the tragic decay of this life, and even the most ordinary acts of love give a glimpse into eternity.

I still hope to fulfill my creative ambitions. With the perspective of being five years into parenthood, I can see how my panic that children would make writing impossibly difficult was a bit dramatic--they do eventually learn how to sleep on their own and stop nursing round the clock. 

Yet, there's a peace in knowing that if I live these primary vocations as wife and mother faithfully, whether or not professional success is a part of the picture, I will have lived a life of transcendent beauty.


About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a stay-at-home mom to three and lives in Houston, Texas. She runs a creative small business, Pax Paper.

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Why I'm Grateful for Traditional Wedding Vows

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

This probably isn't a surprise to most, but when you get married in the Catholic Church, you don't get to write your own vows. For some, this might be difficult to accept as the wedding industry attempts to ingrain in brides that their wedding day is preeminently theirs and every detail and moment of the day should reflect them alone.

Moreover, movies, TV shows, and real-life weddings often show in beautiful, humorous, and tear-jerking ways that vows can be a way to express the unique love shared between the bride and groom--a love not shared by any other couple. Being told you must use vows shared with countless other couples can be a bit of a letdown.

However, the problem the Church has with couples writing their own vows is that, by doing so, they pledge themselves to their own idea of what marriage is rather than what the Church teaches marriage is. What, then, does the Church teach that marriage is?

There's a part in C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces that I think movingly encapsulates the Christian truth about marriage. In the passage that follows, the character of Psyche is about to be sacrificed to a monster. Despite her fate, she is surprisingly full of equanimity and tells her sister:

 "And how would it be better if I had lived? I suppose I should have been given to some king in the end...And there you can see again how little difference there is between dying and being married. To leave your home — to lose you...to lose one's maidenhead — to bear a child — they are all deaths."

 Amidst wedding day daydreams of dresses and flowers and perfect color palettes, the idea of marriage as a death might seem emphatically unromantic. But as with death, there is a veil that covers marriage preventing us from fully seeing what is beyond. No matter the amount of preparation you put into marriage, you still can't fully understand what you're getting into until you're actually in thick of it.

In fact, marriage is more than just a death, in the sense that you can't see beyond the threshold of the wedding day.

Like any vocation, marriage is a crucifixion. When you answer 'Yes' to God's call in your life, you choose to nail your will to Christ's on the Cross.

And herein lies the paradoxical truth of weddings and marriage that stands at odds with the culture's understanding: we're told your wedding day is only about you and your spouse, a celebration of you, a grand display of your wills to marry now, but then to do what you will later.

The Church tells you your wedding and your marriage are not about you. Or rather, they are about you insofar as they are about Christ. Marriage is designed for the salvation of your soul and of the the souls your marriage touches for the glory of Christ. Your wedding day is the willing renunciation of your will. 

How can we then presume to be able to put together more fitting words for entering into a mystery we cannot fully understand? Who better than the Church can give us the right words to renounce our wills and unite them to the Cross?

Like a mother teaching her small child to speak, she teaches you to speak the right words. In her wisdom, she gives you words carefully crafted and passed down through the centuries. They are words that clearly spell out the gravity of what you are doing: making a solemn vow in front of God and man--a vow that cannot be put asunder by will or undone in times of difficulty or distress.

Yes, they are words shared by a multitude of other couples, but for that reason they bind you more closely to the whole Body of Christ. They are words you will be asked to repeat in your thoughts, words, and actions every day of your marriage. And they are words imbued with sacramental grace, to help you and your spouse become a living sign to the world of the love between Christ and His Church.


Dominika Ramos.png

About the Author: Dominika Ramos is a native of Houston, Texas though she dreams of spending her days frolicking in the English countryside. She and her husband met at the University of St. Thomas, where she studied English literature, and they were married at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Walsingham on the Feast of the Visitation in 2014. Her life is currently composed of running Pax Paper, a hand-lettering and illustration business, blogging about the transcendental aspects of motherhood (among other things) at A Quiet Quest, and chasing after her rambunctious and delightful toddler son.

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Consider a Betrothal Ceremony: What it Is, Why it's Significant + How to Plan One

DOMINIKA RAMOS

 

An audio version of this blog post was featured on our podcast on 10/20/2020.

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When my husband and I became engaged, we decided to have a betrothal ceremony. At the time, we knew very few couples who had had one, and fewer people still who knew anything about it. 

A betrothal ceremony, or a Rite of Betrothal, is the traditional way of becoming officially engaged in the eyes of the Church. It's a short but beautiful ceremony, in which the couple solemnly pledges to marry one another on a specified date. We were drawn to the ceremony for several reasons:

image: Jiza Zito

image: Jiza Zito

As a blessing for our engagement.

My husband and I were both in school during our engagement. In the midst of scouring the web for bridesmaid dresses and trying to keep up with reading for class, it was a lovely pause in our lives to solidify our response to the call of marriage and receive graces that helped make our engagement a period of deeper spiritual enrichment than it might have felt otherwise. 

One element I particularly love about the Rite is that it includes a blessing over the engagement ring. There's a temptation as a newly engaged young woman to scrutinize and compare rings with other engaged friends, yet having your ring blessed can be a powerful reminder to reject comparison. It's a gift to receive your engagement ring again after the ceremony, now transfigured by the blessing into a sacramental. These days when I'm changing diapers or washing dishes and catch a glance of my sacramental engagement and wedding rings, it serves as a reminder to say a quick prayer for my marriage and family. 

As an opportunity for our families to come together to celebrate our engagement.

We tried to keep things simple in planning our wedding, so our betrothal ceremony became the perfect opportunity to get our families together in lieu of having an elaborate engagement party. If you or your fiancé come from a family that isn't particularly religious, the ceremony can be an opportunity to express to them your belief that marriage and family are founded on, and strengthened by, faith.

As a reflection of how seriously we took marriage.

Far more than being a nice thing to do, a Rite of Betrothal contractually obligates the engaged couple to be married on a specific date. What the man has proposed to the woman then becomes a binding agreement, which, if the engagement were to be called off, would have to be formally dissolved by a priest. Thus, for the couple and for the witnesses, the ceremony sets the tone for the gravity of marriage as not merely a declaration of love, but a profound covenant wrought by God.

Betrothals can be as elaborate or as simple as you wish. We held our betrothal ceremony after our parish's Saturday Vigil Mass in the small chapel where we'd gotten engaged, with only our immediate family members present. However, another bride I know had hymns, flowers, formal invitations, and a guest list of fifty.

You might have yours after Sunday Mass with family members and your bridal party and go out to brunch afterwards. You might have a larger ceremony and have a reception in place of an engagement party. Or you might have it at your parents' home, with a private Mass and an intimate dinner, if you have a family friend who is a priest.

Unless your priest is familiar with old and somewhat obscure devotions of the Church, it's likely that he won't have heard of a betrothal ceremony. The priest who did our ceremony (and later celebrated our marriage) happened to be a zealous convert to the faith, so he was thrilled when we introduced him to this tradition. If you're met with hesitation, seeking out a priest who is more comfortable with traditional liturgical practices might be the way to go. 

Engagement is frequently seen as a frustratingly harried waiting period, but it's not. It's a pilgrimage. And a betrothal ceremony is a holy seal and blessing sending you on your way down the path to your vocation--down the path to greater union with God. In a world where the meaning of marriage is constantly misshapen to fit personal desires, a betrothal ceremony is a beautiful and bold way of witnessing to the truth of God's design for this sacrament.

The text for the Rite of Betrothal can be found here.


Dominika Ramos is a native of Houston, Texas though she dreams of spending her days frolicking in the English countryside. She and her husband met at the University of St. Thomas, where she studied English literature, and they were married at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Walsingham on the Feast of the Visitation in 2014. Her life is currently composed of running Pax Paper, a hand-lettering and illustration business, blogging about the transcendental aspects of motherhood (among other things) at A Quiet Quest, and chasing after her rambunctious and delightful toddler son.  PAX PAPER | BLOG | INSTAGRAM