Come My Beloved: My Review

Come My Beloved: Inspiring Stories of Catholic Courtship

About the Book:

Come My Beloved: Inspiring Stories of Catholic Courtship is a celebration of faith and enduring love. This compilation contains 12 courtship/dating stories which will inspire, captivate and entertain readers. Some of the stories include: a widow with eight children meets a widower with six children; a man asks his live-in girlfriend "what if we stopped having sex," and is greeted with tears of joy; an atheist falls in love with her Catholic Prince Charming; a woman prays to God for a husband and years later finds herself falling in love with a seminarian; a sailor prays a novena to marry the right girl. What these and all the stories illustrate is that God is the ideal matchmaker.

My Comments:

Often in church when we hear about discerning a vocation, we think about priesthood or the religious life.  It is easy to forget that the ordinary state of matrimony is a vocation, a calling from God, as well.  Unfortunately, many of us approach the hunt for a mate in a manner closer to a shopping trip than answering a call from God--and while we may have said we were looking for for a Coach bag, how many of us shopped at Wal-Mart?  Come My Beloved: Inspiring Stories of Catholic Courtship is the story of twelve couples whose approach to dating and marriage was similar to that of people discerning a religious vocation (and not surprisingly, several of the people involved had discerned with religious communities).  God was intimately involved in helping them choose (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say find) their mates.  

Each couple's story is told in its own chapter, and it is obvious that some of the couples include a professional writer, and others don't.  These are their stories, told in their words, not some sanitized and ghost-written paraphrase.  For the most part, their stories are stories of chaste courtships, attending mass together and praying with and for each other.  

Each chapter ends with a "where they are now" paragraph, and while some of the moms work at home, most homeschool large families.  All have been together many years at this point.  If I have a criticism of the book it is that the couples all seem so perfect--and I realize they aren't, and that they know it, but this book is the story of them falling in love, not the story of the nitty-gritty work needed to stay that way.  

Two of the couples profiled might be familiar to those of you who are Sunday Snippets regulars.  Ellen Gable Hrkach compiled the book and includes a chapter about herself and her husband.  Sarah from A Snoring Scholar is also featured.  

I downloaded the book for free on Valentine's Day.  Grade:  B+.