About

Tomas and I were married in 2007, on the seventh of July. It took us a while to notice we had landed on one of the most coveted dates of the decade, 7/7/07. People sometimes ask whether our lucky date is the reason we have lasted, in an age when “happily ever after” is treated as a fantasy. The truth is it has nothing to do with 7/7/07 and everything to do with October of 2005, when we began praying night prayer together and have scarcely missed an evening since.

We met in college, where Tomas was a friendly acquaintance and not much more, until the day I said my goodbyes and walked off campus for another school. A week later a letter arrived, sealed with wax and stamped with his Czech family crest, asking whether I might be his pen pal. I started watching for the mailman. I would never call my husband eccentric, old-fashioned, perhaps, with his fountain pens and his sermons on the lost art of letter writing, but I always knew exactly what I was getting into. Mostly.

These days we are a large Catholic family, seven children, building our little domestic church. We came up in the Roman Rite and were drawn slowly eastward over the years, until we were no longer Latins borrowing a few Eastern customs but Melkites who still treasure a few Latin ones. At Christmas of 2023 we were received into the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, where five of our children were chrismated and received Communion for the first time. We have come to love what St. John Paul II meant when he said the Church must breathe with both her lungs.

Tomas is now a first-year candidate in the Melkite Deacon Formation Program. Where that road leads is for the Church to discern as much as for us; for now, we are grateful simply to be walking it.

There are things we think we get right, and a great many we know we could do better. Our hope is to share a little of both, and to offer some encouragement to anyone else on this beautiful, exhausting, ordinary road toward holiness.

Christ is Among Us!

-Tomas and Hannah Voboril