Saint Joseph ~ Patron of Belgium ~ "Thoughts and Prayers"

It's a talkative world. And when we talk a lot there's always the risk of speaking glibly, superficially ~ like rushing into a conversation and asking someone, "How are you?" and then not waiting for an honest reply, the other answering, "Fine!" when perhaps he or she is not "fine" at all. Just an expression. 

And in all of these terrible terrorist episodes people say to the wounded nation, "You're in our thoughts and prayers." I so hope they mean it. Does that mean: I will stop what I'm doing to ponder this horror and to pray, or just let it flash through my mind while I'm stuck in mall traffic?

Media people are especially guilty of this - just words to wrap up an interview. Then they might say something like, "The nation is getting back to normal...people are moving on with their lives." The dead haven't even been identified, their bodies so destroyed, and the news anchor is declaring the nation is getting back to normal. Why do we talk this way?

Saint Joseph is the patron of Belgium. We might stop right now and pray before his icon here on the screen: Joseph Guardian, Protector, Mentor. Our prayer might be silent - a thought held. When these terrorist acts happen, people gather in huge numbers to gaze, to bring a flower or a candle, to be silent in solidarity with the others who are grieving. Pope John Paul II brought the word solidarity forward. It is a very important word.

For those who died this week in Brussels.

For those who are in mourning.

For those who are searching for loved ones.

For rescuers and helpers.

For the injured in hospitals.

For doctors and nurses who care.

For those who give blood to help the injured.

For those whose task is to identify the dead.

For those who plan and do evil, murderous things.

For investigators and police.

For those who are leaders.

For people who are frightened.

For anyone who is traumatized.

For the children who are afflicted.

For those who must travel.

For those who carry violence and hate inside.

For people who feel sad.

For those who twist up religion.

For those who are losing hope and happiness.

For those who make themselves into human bombs.

On the Feast of Saint Joseph

Flight into Egypt ~ Francisco Zurbaran 1598-1664

This painting by Francisco Zurbaran of The Flight Into Egypt is full of life: the mountains and hills, the trees fully leafed out, the heavy sky perhaps portending a storm or reflecting the desperation of the family in flight, even the ground itself. And Mary is seated rather queen-like, her satiny red dress covering even the donkey. Joseph's got his straw hat hanging off his back, while Mary wears her own instead of a veil. The little Christ sits upright in his mother's arms. 

And aren't we fortunate that Zurbaran has given us this open perspective which seems to invite us into the dynamic. Is the artist suggesting that we might stop with the family and offer them our encouragement? Or better yet - perhaps Joseph is suggesting they might encourage us in our own inner traveling from discouragement to hope, from anger to calm, from bitterness to surrender, from something we might call darkness to renewed light.

Joseph ~ solicitous of the mother,

Joseph ~ in solidarity with the child,

Joseph ~ simply kind,

Joseph ~ active out of silence,

Joseph ~ in the fierce darkness.

Joseph ~ in the twists and turns,

Joseph ~ attentive to the dreams,

Joseph ~ heedful of warnings,

Joseph ~ in the poverty of your temple gift,

Joseph ~ in your interior life.

Joseph ~ with Simeon and Anna,

Joseph ~ in the expansion of my heart,

Joseph ~ holy traveler,

Joseph ~ among strangers,

Joseph ~ whose tears are an offering.

Joseph ~ giving the name, Jesus,

Joseph ~ in the nearness of mystery,

Joseph ~ on the road to Bethlehem,

Joseph ~ in the welcoming of shepherds,

Joseph ~ in your bright-sadness.

Joseph ~ Mary's confidant,

Joseph ~ protector and mentor,

Joseph ~ and the fig tree bowed,

Joseph ~ and the desert stream gushed,

Joseph ~ may God give an increase.

Smiling Matters

Joseph smiling! Here is his statue found on  the facade of the 13th century gothic cathedral of Reims in France. We might imagine that Joseph has just seen Mary from a distance and is smiling to greet her. Or that he is delivering the good news of having found a shelter for his pregnant wife in Bethlehem. Or that the young Jesus has just spoken his first word.

A human face contains forty three muscles which makes us capable of tremendous unspoken expression. One could say that our ability to smile is among the very important aspects of being human. But our minds control our smiling, so like our thoughts, our smiles can be used for good or ill. Joseph is surely smiling for good in the Reims statue.

But smiles can also be used wrongly. A smile can trick or manipulate. A smile can be used to conceal hate or dishonesty. A smile can be a smirk: "I know something you don't know." 

I had a pastor years ago who smiled even when people were objecting angrily to some decision  he made. It left them feeling as if he wasn't hearing them or didn't take their concerns seriously. 

But a real smile communicates pleasure, friendship and affection. Remember the gospel scene where Jesus met the young man who asked about following as a disciple. And when Jesus realized the fellow wasn't up to it, that he couldn't give it up, he "looked at him with love."  (Mark 10:21) No doubt Jesus' look was accompanied by a kind smile.

There's an awful lot of scowling today, eye-rolling, scrunched brows, tysk-ing and frowning. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. wrote: "I would have considered a vocation to the ministry, except that so many of them resembled more the undertaker." We need more smiles: genuine, open and warm.

But of course, how we smile depends upon what's going on inside us: what we're thinking about, how much we are distracted or controlled by resentments. Complainers, grumblers and critics usually don't smile - warmly anyway. We don't have to suffer such discontent! 

And let's be honest - if we don't smile at people, we have no cause  or right to expect others will smile at us. 

Joseph ~ That With Spiritual Sight Made Pure...

THIS AMAZING PAINTING of Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus comes from 17th-18th century Peru. Of course the pair didn't dress like this, but their fabulous clothes are demonstrative of delight in heavenly things, joyful faith, and over-the-top love. All's well here: the hills are flowering and Jesus is secure hand-in-hand with Joseph. The boy carries a small basket with carpenter tools, much as a little child would carry a play tool box today.

Joseph is handsome, wide-eyed and  proud of the boy, happy in his calling. A lily in the hand of a saint always indicates chastity. But I think it's much more than that. The Collect from the Mass for the Second Sunday of Lent prayed:

O God Who have commanded us
to listen to your beloved Son,
be pleased we pray,
to nourish us inwardly by your word,
that with spiritual sight made pure,
we may rejoice to behold your glory.

"That with spiritual sight made pure..." How do we even begin to attain that kind of sight? Joseph points the way.

We live in a culture that can't stop talking. We take "freedom of speech" so literally our problem has become "too much speech". Where there is much talking, sin cannot be avoided, a priest friend says. And we are to believe everything that's said is important, funny and true. Joseph's life-way wasn't easy: the confusion of Mary's pregnancy, resolute in the face of what must have been his family's disappointment if not horror, standing with Mary when the community could have stoned her, the exhausting travel, Herod wanting the newborn gone, losing the twelve-year old boy. There was a lot Joseph could have complained about bitterly. But's he's silent. There's no recorded word of Joseph throughout the Gospel accounts. 

Joseph usually receives accolades for his purity and obedience. I think his silence is the most important virtue he has to share with us. We can't hear God or each other because there's so much talking and so little listening. The beauty of the old Mass is that it was essentially silent. I often wonder about the Mass we have today - that there are so many words. It frequently strikes me as very noisy, especially when there is a piling up of hymns. 

Anyway, maybe in this second week of Lent we might listen not just to the fact that so many others are talking so much, but we might be all the more aware of ourselves. Or that even our prayer is too talkative. We might add a new dimension to our Lent in silencing so much of the noise that's born of talking. We might find the more quiet day to be unnerving. I wonder if a lot of people hate Jesus Christ because he is to be listened to. Jesus is even called The Word and we often don't like listening (unless we find it tantalizing or flattering). Shhhh!

Joseph in the Nativity Icon

 

HERE IS JOSEPH, way down in the bottom left corner of the icon. He is sitting all alone on a tree stump, his hand in his head. His back is turned to the entire Christmas story. This is strange for the Westener who always sees Joseph at the very heart of the Bethlehem events - standing with a light over the Holy Child. What's going on?

Joseph is seated this way in all Eastern Icons of the Nativity, though usually there are a couple of figures standing before him dressed as shepherds. We might wonder if this icon isn't really larger than what we can see here. Perhaps it is a wall painting and the "shepherd" figures are around the corner of the room. Nevertheless, these are devil-tempters who come to Joseph disguised as shepherds, sent to tempt Joseph into non-believing. 

Joseph, especially in Saint Matthew's Gospel, has been an important player, what with his numerous angel dream-visitations who have instructed him in the protection of the Mother and Child. Now it seems he is having a moment: Is this for real? Is this becoming too much to bear? Is this Child really born of God's Holy Spirit? Has Mary really been faithful? Poor Joseph, we can understand his feeling confounded. But we know from the rest of the story that when danger was near soon after this event, he was up and off to Egypt (of all places) to continue his role as guardian.

Sitting by Joseph here in this little corner of tempting disillusionment, we might hold the inner place of our own fearful doubts - not dogma doubts - but the struggle to believe in God's accompany-ing, remedy-ing presence: during unemployment, when overwhelmed with fatigue, when success is lacking, joy is fleeting, money is tight, life is shifting sands, the losses seemingly too much to bear. Let Joseph reassure us that heaven is near and God is patient in understanding.

"Blessed Joseph Her Spouse"

RECENTLY POPE FRANCIS ASKED  the priests of the Latin Rite around the world to place Saint Joseph's name in the Eucharistic Prayer of the Mass, after the name of Jesus' Mother, Mary. This news isn't as monumental as the pope's  initiating a probe into the Vatican Bank, but it has significance for the Church, especially if we can see the addition as more than just the pope sharing his devotion.

Mary and Joseph were married. But in the ancient biblical world, once the couple was married and before they lived together as husband and wife, they went apart separately to live with other married people to learn how to be good spouses to each other.

We shouldn't just assume that people know how to be good husbands and wives; mothers and fathers. Indeed, that so many marriages fail so often and so quickly, perhaps suggests that some practical teaching time might be a very good idea. Marriage failure isn't someone else's fault.  It takes a lot of hard work and self-forgetting to make marriages strong and enduring.

In the old ritual book used at weddings, the priest used to  read a long instruction to the young couple before the exchange of vows. The word sacrifice or sacrificial appears six times in those pages. Are most people ready for that?

Anyway, when Mary told Joseph she was pregnant and that he wasn't the father, Joseph was understandably confused and upset. But in a dream the angel told him to take Mary into his home as his wife. Then when the baby was born and Herod was angry at hearing there was a child around who was being called a king, Joseph was again summoned into action by a dream-angel and the little family fled to Egypt. Finally, when the coast was clear, Joseph took his wife and the child to Galilee, yet again directed by an angelic navigator, circumventing murderous trouble in Judea. This action packed story is found in Matthew 1:1 - 2:23.

It is a hard story, full of threats and fears, disrupted sleep, long and miserable travel, tiring obedience, disappointment in plans that didn't work out, twists and turns, enemies lurking, poverty and future unknowns. And in all of this, Joseph is the original action man of the New Testament. He doesn't get into a major fight with Mary,  leaving her and the child abandoned. In fact, he is so plugged in and receptive to God's purposes, only gradually unfolding, that we don't hear him speak at all throughout the story - he just listens and acts.

Isn't this refreshing in a world of incessant talking: commercials and infomercials, sitcoms with canned laughter after each spoken line, politicians who seem to be standing in front of microphones at every turn, radio talk show hosts who bloviate (talk much and say nothing). Even in the life of the Church it's a frequent complaint that the clerics who stand in the pulpit are taking a long time to say very little or that Church life is a series of endless meetings which bear little fruit.

Maybe we have Joseph, newly featured, to help quiet us down - if we will dare it. Saint Benedict begins his rule for monks with the word: Listen! I recently showed a forest waterfall to young Nicholas, who asked to climb to the top, to see where the water went over the cliff. As he took video of the falls from different and interesting angles, we didn't speak, but simply listened.. Then tracing the stream back away from the roar of the falls, he made a video of a mossy grove of ferns and trees where the only sound was that of the rain patting the leaves and the  quiet pools of water along the edges of the stream. At one point I simply put my finger to  my lips, and listening, he filmed the quiet.

But this fresh sense of listening has to invade our home and work lives too. In an article on the troubled state of marriage, a woman asks, "Why can't I find a man who can listen as long as I can talk?" Some men will roll their eyes or make fun of this woman, without even knowing who she is or what she's really asking. They will just assume she talks too much and that to listen to her would be burdensome. Maybe the woman is simply expressing what many women don't ever express: that they feel unheard by the men who say they love them. All throughout the story, it's Joseph the Listener.  Indeed, he listened to angels! What does that mean?

Brother Roger of Taize said that we should never engage in any kind of proposed dialogue until we are able to speak and understand the language of the other. He's not talking about German, Italian, African dialect, French. Roger means we shouldn't engage in dialogue until we understand the other person's sense of history, their conceptual life - where they're coming from. Instead, today so many people appraoch conversation with their minds already made up. Come hell or high water, they are going to get their agenda across.

Pope Benedict XVI suggested that the first project the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches might undertake towards unity would be to write a common history. What a marvelous idea! But were that ever to happen, I'd suggest, that the greatest gift given to the world, would not have been the volumes written, but the modeling of the great, mutual and humble listening that would have been required to produce those volumes in the first place.

Blessed Joseph, Husband of Mary...that we would be changed, and that our world would be changed through listening.