“the sacrament of the present moment”

29 years with my beloved, the birthday of Wallace Stevens, and Caussade's Abandonment to Divine Providence

For me, October 2nd is significant.

First and most importantly, this year it is the 29th anniversary of the first date with my husband. Secondly, and only as a point of poetic interest, it is also Wallace Stevens’s birthday. (I recently recorded one of his poems, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”, for this Substack.)

This picture was taken shortly after we first started going out in 1994. I was 20 and he was 21.

A couple of days after our first date we went out a second time to the local Starbucks where the store manager was handing out little paper cups with samples of a new drink called a Frappacino. We strolled into the attached Crate & Barrel and ascended the staircase to the furniture showcase on the second floor.

While on the steps he asked, “So how many children do you think you want to have?”

“Five,” I said without batting an eyelash.

He replied, “Me, too.”

I told him that I didn’t want more than four years between my children and no less than two years. And I wanted to have all my children by the time I was 40-years-old. This all sounded quite reasonable to him—and quite impossible to plan and so we laughed it off. We were young and barely out of our teen years. What did we know?

Lo and behold… as of this month we will have been married for 23 years and have five children with no less than a 2 year 4 month space between the closest and 3 year 11 month gap between the furthest apart. And my last child was born when I was 40.

Sometimes God laughs at our plans.

Sometimes He holds us to them.

We are very lucky, not only to have found each other so young, but also to have a loving, affectionate partnership despite our polar opposite natures. My extroversion to this introversion. My hyperactivity to his steadfastness. My sanguine-choleric to his melancholic-phlegmatic. What seems to have kept us together is having shared core values and faith. And sheer stubbornness.

Our lives are hectic but purposeful, complicated but intellectually stimulating, and always abounding in love because of our long understanding of each other’s natures and the manifestation of our love through the fruits of that affection: our children.

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It has been somewhat odd and incongruous to be reading the work of Wallace Stevens, a man who was very unhappily married and whose birthday is a day of romantic significance in my life.

Wallace Stevens married Elsie Kachel, a beautiful but poorly educated girl from his hometown of Reading, PA. Her family lived, quite literally, on the wrong side of the tracks, and Stevens’ parents disapproved of his marriage to the young woman. None of his family members attended his wedding, and Stevens’ relationship with his parents was so strained that he did not speak to his family until his father died.

The couple had only one child, Holly, and after she was born Elsie banished her husband from the marriage bed. Stevens’ wife suffered from mental illness for much of her life, and when Wallace was dying from stomach cancer Elsie never once visited her husband.

The Interior Paramour of Wallace Stevens’ poetry may have been, in part, a compensation for the fact that Elsie could not be the real paramour of his life.

From “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”:

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, 
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Although Stevens had said “a poem need not have a meaning” great poems still move the reader to great feeling. Art possesses the unique ability to pull our souls little outside of our corporeal senses by some type of attractive power such as beauty or novelty. In many of Wallace’s poems I sense the echoes of deep unhappiness. As Helen Vendler the American literary critic had written about another one of Stevens' poems,

“The Auroras of Autumn” is long and multihued, but ultimately, said Vendler, “an assertion that life is always tragedy.”¹

For more information about Wallace Stevens, Dana Gioia’s YouTube channel has a wonderful video here:

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Speaking of Dana Gioia, the day after Rhina Espaillat’s celebration a couple of weeks ago I got to have lunch with him and several very smart and talented people. After lunch he recommended I read Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence. It is a slim religious work written by a Jesuit priest who lived in France from 1675 to 1751. Caussade speaks eloquently about “the sacrament of the present moment” and how we need to live and act in the time we are given—no matter how ordinary and commonplace, and no matter how painful at times.

Published in 1861 (well after Caussade’s death), it is quite possible that it influenced the writings of St. Thérèse de Lisieux, who was born in 1873. They have many similarities, especially the idea of surrendering to God’s will with simplicity and cheerfulness. The translator, John Beevers, also translated St. Thérèse’s Story of a Soul, and I find that her writing, which is anchored by details of her personal life, may be a better starting point for those uninitiated with old Catholic religious texts. Though a small book, Caussade is repetitive and simple. Also, the idea of surrender and abandonment to God’s will may be difficult for American readers who are steeped in a culture that values self-reliance, independence, and never surrendering.

Left: Picture taken after lunch of Dana Gioia's copy. Right: The copy I read at my girls’ swim lessons. Same translator: John Beevers.

Both Caussade and St. Thérèse remind me of a well-known saying by St. Teresa of Calcutta: Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.

Caussade says that all Mary and Joseph needed to do for their sainthood was to be a mother and a father to Jesus. No great works or miracles were required of them. Thus, no great things are required of any of us to be saints. My husband and I are devoted to each other by the quotidian aspects of our lives. We do not have much, but we have enough, and we have learned to trust in Providence. It has served as very well for over two decades—through hardship and trial.

My beloved is the one I trust above all else. The one whom I am most happy to see and speak to. I cannot think of any other man I would want to be with, for he is faithful to me and has saved my life in a literal way. I would not be here today if it were not for this man. He has cared for me when no one else could, and on a daily basis he has exemplified the meaning of love: to want the good of another.

He has always cared for my soul.

And I care about his.

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And here are the last two stanzas from “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”:

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one... 
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, 
We make a dwelling in the evening air, 
In which being there together is enough.

We can never really know the mind of our beloved, whether it be our spouse or our God. All knowledge of our relationships lies in the imagination, and we have to trust that that that we are loved in a great way. When we speak about the virtue of Faith, we are talking about a willingness to let our imagination contemplate communion through love—with no hope of fully understanding.

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Today, October 15, is our 23rd wedding anniversary.

And it is also the feast day of Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish Carmelite saint and mystic. She is most known for The Interior Castle and her devotion to meditation and quiet prayer. I think back to this past Friday at Adoration when my husband knelt beside me holding his rosary. He is usually too busy working to join my weekly prayer time, but the stresses of the every day had drawn us to the same place: to the quiet light of the liturgical East.

I am thankful for these times “when being together is enough” and my paramour need not be interior but one on whose shoulder I can rest. And I am thankful to a Jesuit priest in France who lived so long ago and spoke about the sacrament of the present moment—giving me the words to remind me of the graces of the now.

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I rarely paywall anything but today is a special occasion. For people of our age, twenty-three years is a long time to be married!

Below the cut, my paid subscribers will be able see a selfie of me and my ever tolerant beloved. (He’s not a selfie guy. It will be apparent in the picture.) I am tickled that some of you will get to compare the picture of us above with this more recent picture almost three decades later.

And the next is one of my favorite family pictures of the seven of us at the foot of a wooden statue of Jesus whose arms are outstretched above us. It is an older pictures so the children were smaller and a bit harder to wrangle. We were not looking in the same direction, and I had a toddler wrapping herself in the skirt of my teal nursing dress. It captured that time of our lives quite well. And it is still, despite the messiness of it all, a beautiful picture.

And there is a fun BONUS selfie from a couple of weeks ago.

Thank you for financially supporting my Masters degree in Poetry. I could not do this without you!