NINE DAYS TO CATHOLIC DATING | KAIROS GLOBAL | JANUARY 2024

Author: Kevin Jerome

Intro: Kevin Jerome introduces the Hallow app’s dating novena.

A novena for dating? Yes, you heard it right. Whether you have just started talking to someone, are already in a relationship, or getting married next month, the Dating Novena on the Hallow app is a great spiritual exercise as the time you spend dating is an incredible opportunity to discern how God is calling you to love him, others, and yourself well. Curated by Catholic speaker, author and musician Emily Wilson, the novena takes you on a nine day (duh!) journey of reflection and prayer, moulding us to love God deeply through our relationship. 

As important as it is to pray for one another individually during the course of dating, it is equally important to reflect on the ways God is inviting both of you to love him more through your relationship. As you pray the novena, you are invited to bring God open hands and open hearts, praying that as you date and discern, you release your tight grip and desire to control, and instead allow God to lead you with his love and peace. 

The dating novena is structured so as to help us identify the essential virtues and graces required for holy relationships, especially those for marriage, and prepare ourselves to grow in those virtues and receive those graces which we will eventually carry with us into our married life. Each day of the novena focuses on one of the nine specific virtues or graces, beginning with a brief reflection and a small prayer asking for God’s help, for clear direction in our discernment, for the grace to grow closer to him, and to lead us to a healthy and holy relationship. The novena ends with a beautiful poem-prayer by Fr Joseph Whalen and concludes with a minute of silence with God, giving us an opportunity to meditate on what we listened to and prayed for during the novena. All of this packed into a mere five minutes a day makes it extremely difficult for us to find excuses to not include this in our daily busy schedules that we often claim to have, in spite of the long hours we would otherwise spend conversing with the person we are dating (wink!).

On the first day of the novena, we pray for the courage to be who God created us to be, to share our most authentic self in our relationship and to be a witness to God’s love and light to the people in all areas of our life. We pray for the grace to accept God’s love for us on the second day. We ask God to free us from the temptation to compare our past experiences and relationships with those he has so lovingly shared with us today. 

It is easy to get caught up in the excitement, the newness, the attention and adoration of a relationship, pinning all of our hopes and dreams on one person. However, only with God does true hope for a future of love reside. Hope is the virtue we pray for on the third day. We cannot plan or dream of that future with anyone unless God is at the centre of our life. As St Augustine mentions in his seminal work Confessions, ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’

Day four of the novena begins by asking God to open our ears to hear his voice of guidance and assurance, and our eyes to see clearly the path he desires us to take. We ask for the grace to open our hearts to be at peace with all that he has planned for us and our relationship. This clarity that we pray for will help us in moving past the noise and distractions in life as we discern his will for us.

Wisdom is the virtue we pray for on the fifth day of the novena – the wisdom to always seek the good of the other in all that we do, as St Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church, beautifully articulates what it means to love in his Summa Theologica, ‘To love is to will the good of the other.’ We pray for healing on the sixth day, healing from any negative experiences from our past relationships and any negative view of love and marriage that has taken root in our heart and mind. We ask God to teach us what a healthy relationship looks like and we pray: ‘Fill me with your joy so I can be joy to others.’

The virtue we plead for on day seven of the novena is chastity. We ask God for the grace to be pure of heart, mind, body and spirit. We pray for the courage to honour and respect the image and likeness of God in the person we are dating. On day eight, we pray for growing in our ability and freedom to express our thoughts, feelings, struggles, desires and our hearts to those whom we care about most in our life. As St Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, we also ask for the grace ‘to speak truth in love’ (Ephesians 4:15). 

On the last day of the dating novena, we pray for complete trust in God. We ask him to grant us the grace and humility to entrust our life and all that he has planned for us to his providential care. 

We pray novenas to become disciples, growing in discipline and opening our hearts to God’s will. Over the course of the dating novena, we are invited to offer our relationship up to God and ask him what he is calling us to learn from this other person, and how we can continue to grow closer to him through our relationship. ‘Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.’ - Fr Joseph Whelan SJ

Kevin Jerome is an electronics engineer working in Bangalore, India. He finds joy in pursuing the truth through the beautiful intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church.