He leaned over his glasses, over our new baby snoozing, over my laptop screen, and asked, “Do you want to pray Night Prayer together?” And he knew the answer before I said, “I’d love to, I just really need to finish these few emails, and then...” The truth was that I wouldn’t love to and the emails could wait, and that I’d prefer my productivity over trying a new prayer practice where I was the novice. We didn’t pray it that night, or for many years to come.
Early marriage looked like me as a drowning-at-home mom with many children close in succession and my husband working hard to build a career to support our family. So while he turned to his routine of the Liturgy of the Hours for spiritual nourishment, I would opt for a book about prayer or a podcast on how to pray better—something that kept me busy on the outside but unavailable for the deeper interior work.
It’s easy for couples to say a few rote prayers together. It’s harder to be intentional in praying with and for the other, to truly “will the good of another,” as Saint Thomas Aquinas has reminded us is the nature of love (CCC, no. 1766). And a real grace of the sacrament of marriage is that our souls are more closely bound than even our bodies in marital intimacy, as Pope Pius XI wrote in Casti Connubii (no. 7). So it would follow that our prayer lives are meant to be united as well.
I’m finding now, at sixteen years into marriage, that a united prayer life does look like praying together, but it also looks like going to Mass together, making time for the other to go to Eucharistic adoration while one holds down the fort, encouraging each other to take a silent retreat, and bringing our spouse with us when we receive Holy Communion and Christ joins us to himself in the Eucharist.
If I want to put on the love of Christ and not take it off, then I want the heart of my beloved to draw closer and closer to Jesus. I want what God wants for my husband: a heart fully alive for and with Love. And I want to be God’s hands and feet to help the graces move to make that happen (which means encouraging with my words, but mostly my example!).
For people whose spouses aren’t practicing or are struggling in their faith, it can be helpful for the practicing spouse to make intentional little sacrifices for the other, like fasting from treats or screen time. These little offerings are entrusted to God so that he might continue to show the struggling spouse his deep and abiding love for them.
Create spaces of stillness in this new year. Seek intimacy with Jesus in the Eucharist. Encourage your spouse to step deeper into a relationship with God through your own loving example. This year, may your spiritual union as a couple be enkindled! Lord Jesus, bring to us your light that is life to guide us ever closer to you!
