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September 16, 2020St. Joseph has played a very important and very hidden part in my spiritual life for a long time. When I was confirmed in 3rd grade, I remember choosing him as my patron saint only because his name started with the same letter as mine, and John the Baptist was already picked (truly a well thought out decision!). Yet growing up I was always struck by that sudden choice, a sudden presence in that important moment of my life. I eventually realized, however, that he was the one to choose me, not the other way around.
Yet whenever I strove to draw closer to him, I would run into a brick wall. There’s so little material in the Gospels about him. He doesn’t speak a single word! How am I supposed to get close to someone I know so little about? I also found that the classic portrayal of Joseph as a middle-aged man with a carpenter’s square was hard for me to relate to.
About a month ago, I found Consecration to St. Joseph: The Wonders of Our Spiritual Father by Father Donald Calloway, MIC. In this book, Father Calloway wonderfully guides the reader through a 33-Day Preparation for Consecration to St. Joseph with short daily meditations, as well as rather in-depth texts on most every aspect of who St. Joseph is and why Our Lord longs for us to draw near to him. I would like to share some reflection on the profound gift that God has given me during this time.
First, I have gained a renewed appreciation for the power and essence of St. Joseph’s fatherhood. Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father, but he was his moral and spiritual father, something far more exalted. To the Child Jesus’s humanity, which was in need of nourishment, moral instruction, example, and secure emotional attachment, St. Joseph was the earthly icon of God the Father; he provided all of that to Christ perfectly. What a high station and honor! St. Joseph was the man Jesus ran to when he was scared, frightened, or sad, and even more, he was always received, known, and comforted! In this way, Joseph instilled in Christ the knowledge of the boundless love of the Father—it was Joseph who gave to Christ’s human nature his unshakable identity as Son of the Father.
This is made even more potent through an altered understanding of Joseph as a young man, a vivacious man with spirit and joy, who loved young Mary not with the doting of a grandfather, but with the chaste and burning fire of youth! How much strength he must have needed to defend, provide for, and aid Mary and Jesus on their pilgrim Exile in Egypt, and to lift great stone and lumber as a worker in Nazareth!
As a son of David and the father of the Holy Family, God made Joseph king over his own greatest treasures: his spouse and his son. He did this for a reason. Joseph stopped at nothing to guard them and give them refuge. No heinous villain would have dared plunder those under the charge of Joseph. Clearly, there is great power and courage here.
Yet in all this, Joseph remained a quiet and humble man, working as a mere laborer for the son of God and his mother. How mysterious a life, and how well Joseph knew the wonders he had been given, spending day after day, month after month, year after year silently pondering and contemplating the presence of God incarnate and the greatest creature ever dreamed! How different this is from our busy, noisy, and anxious lives. St. Joseph had the grace of contemplation in the midst of the noise, precisely because he knew to seek silence in order to grow more intimate with the tiny whisper of God speaking in his heart. What a different world ours would be, if we obtained the grace of imitating St. Joseph. I pray that all of us may gain such a gift.
