This is such a great reminder for couples. Marriage bonds will weaken if they are not intentionally worked on. The activities we share are building blocks for our relationship…
“We had a great time at the Christmas concert.”
By Love Refined, Alice von Hildebrand
Dear Julie,
How delighted I was to hear that you have begun going to concerts together and that in particular you have both come to love Handel’s Messiah! What a world music opens for us!
When I’ve been deeply gripped by emotions, I’ve often had to say, “I just can’t express it in words.” Music sings what our words would like to say, but can’t.
Your shared love of beautiful music is no doubt one of the great blessings of your marriage. That was a gift granted to me, too, in a very extraordinary way because my husband and I had exactly the same love for music, nature, and art, and responded in the same way to beauty.
Sharing an experience with another person deepens the quality of the experience. I feel this bitterly now that I’m alone. At times, it’s almost unbearable to hear one of our beloved pieces of music and to be unable to hold my husband’s hand and to look into his eyes.
So I understand your joy: sharing an experience is so much richer and more delightful than merely being in the same room with another person who happens to be performing the same activity as you, but who isn’t consciously sharing the experience with you.
If another person happens to look at the same painting I’m looking at in a museum, we’re not sharing because we don’t intend to have the experience together. Our being there at the same time isn’t deliberate.
It’s quite different when you and Michael choose to look at an object together. Then a triangle is formed: the object and the two of you looking at it together. (Perhaps God will grant you the blessing of having a child. If so, you’ll experience sharing in a particularly deep way when you and Michael bend over the crib and look at your child together.)
Unfortunately, too few people have ever truly shared experiences with another person, fully conscious of their deliberately having the same experience together, delighting both in the object and in the fact that another is delighting in it with them.
Many spouses live in the same house together and eat at the same table, but have lost a lived-experience of truly sharing their lives and their souls with each other.
Most tragic of all, some have given up hope that this is even possible. Their loneliness must be incomprehensible!
I encourage you, then, to nurture the beautiful sense of communion you have with Michael. What better way to do it than with great music! Plato was right: in its encounter with beauty, the human soul grows wings.
I will keep both of you deeply in my prayers during this holy Christmas season.
Lily
“Happiness in marriage must be earned. It is something you must work out for yourself, chiefly by forgetting yourself and serving others. No marriage is a success unless less you make it so, and that takes persistent effort and, still more, a constant and humble reliance on God.” – Fr. Lawrence G. Lovasik. The Catholic Family Handbook
Running a house, while schooling, making meals, etc. is no little task. So…we roll up our sleeves and dig in each day. THIS is what we are called to. Let us not get distracted thinking we should be doing great things, learning about great matters of the world. NO. St. Therese calls us the do the “little things” each day. And really, it is a great thing to accomplish all the “so-called” little tasks…. If you enjoy this video , please Like and Subscribe.
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Yes things shared together are better when both sides like them! Otherwise there is a loss that can grow with time. 😔
Thank you.
Thank you Leanne. Praying that you will feel better.
So grateful to read your posts again.
Thank you Tracy. God bless you! ❤️
Was thinking about this very thing concerning sharing interests and quality time with my husband, especially after we both have been sick for almost a month with a flu bug. It is never easy, and one needs to make the effort and create a mindset that “I get to spend special time with my spouse”, not, “I don’t have time, I have so much to do”. There will always be great lists of things to get done, always. But we do not know how much time God will give us to spend together in this life, and he is my way to heaven, and I need to be his way to heaven, too.
Praying for you daily Leane, so good to read your blogs again! God bless and heal you.🙏🌹One day at a time, it’s all God gives us, it’s all He wants us to be concerned about.