As many couples tie the knot this summer, Father Dave, guest co-host Kathryn Whitaker, and speaker and author Rachel Bulman examine a Catholic wife’s vocation. Her new book exploring this topic is called, “Becoming Wife: Saying Yes to More Than the Dress.”
Kathryn and Rachel discuss how their friendship began on social media before they met in-person in an unlikely place. Rachel recalls, “We bonded in line at Disney [World], rode ‘Slinky Dog Dash,’ and cried in line. It’s the first time we ever met each other.” Kathryn adds, “We went deep, real fast – just talking about how we were both converts, the way that we grew up, and how that has influenced our marriages and our life. It’s not often that you meet somebody that’s so willing to be vulnerable that fast.”
Rachel found inspiration for her book when her husband entered formation to become a permanent deacon. As she examined her own vocation as a Catholic wife, she found out that, “The Catechism [says] that the two Sacraments that are for other people, that have the grace to give to other people, are Holy Orders and Matrimony,” she says. “I remember being completely overwhelmed by that fact alone, and knowing that there needed to be something out there for people to be able to explore, talk about, and pray with: What does it mean to become a spouse, to be a wife?”
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Rachel says her two favorite sections in the book discuss healing and evangelization. “Sometimes we think that when we’re loving other people that we are somehow healing them. But the beauty of love, the expanse of the reality of love, is that when you’re doing that, they’re always healing you too. That is something that happens within my own marriage, and something that I think is a gift within the Sacrament of Marriage; that as you are loving one another, they’re also loving you,” she says.
“Once that becomes just a way of life, this loving and then being loved is happening over and over again, you’re also evangelizing to the world,” Rachel continues. She reflects on a recent moment while traveling, when she and her husband saw an older couple join hands and kiss at a rest stop. She says, “When you see people genuinely love each other, it’s evangelization because all love points to [God] who is love. So when we see people do that just so authentically and freely, like at a rest stop, you’re sitting there being reminded of the love of God, whether you know it or not.”
Rachel highlights the special call that spouses have to recognize gifts in each other and bring them to fruition. She explains how her husband Jason first felt called to the permanent diaconate. She recalls, “We had young adults that would meet here at our house, and one of the young adults told him, ‘You’d be a great deacon.’ And so that night when we were getting ready to go to bed, he [said], ‘Do you really think I’d be a good deacon?’ And I [said], ‘Yes, obviously you would be a great deacon.’ And he [said later], ‘When you said it, it became a possibility. It went from an idea to a possibility.’ And I think that that exchange happens so much in marriage.”
Rachel continues with another example saying, “When the wife is pregnant, this idea of being a father actually becomes a possibility when you tell him, ‘We’re actually having a baby’…It’s something that begins in her womb and grows within her that she then shares with him. There’s just something that is very special and tangible about the reciprocity of the female person, that we can take things and make them grow into new life by the way that we share them with one another. That’s something really beautiful within spousality, within the husband and the wife, that we do it for one another. I think that the wives will have a special place to do that for their husbands.”