In the Heart of Joseph and Mary

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

This meditation is about Mary and Joseph in the Heart of Jesus, basically focusing on marriage and the family.

We're asked to think about divine love and human affection. Our God, in His deepest mystery, is not a solitary being, but a family.

Pope St. John Paul liked to say that God is a communion of persons and that the family is a communion of persons (John Paul II, General Audiences, November 14, 1979; October 22, 1980; Catechism of the Catholic Church, Points 2205, 2331).

He liked to say that the Blessed Trinity is a life-giving communion of persons: a love of the Father for the Son gives rise to the Holy Spirit (cf. Pope John Paul II, Revelation of the Trinitarian Mystery, The Queen, Vol. 010, September 2021) and marriage is also a life-giving communion of persons.

God's inner life is paternity, filiation, and the essence of the family, which is love.

Occasionally we hear that phrase repeated, that “God is love” (1 John 4:8,16). That phrase from Scripture is so very powerful, so very central. It's the essence of everything we live for, and that we have to transmit to people: charity.

Sanctity is charity. As we grow in sanctity, we try to grow in charity. It's on that, that we will be judged.

And so, all the time we could ask God that He who is love might shine a little more in our lives, so that in everything we say and everything we do, that central message might get transmitted in the same way that our Father was able to transmit that message.

Christ is love. The Church is love. The spirit of Opus Dei is love. Everything that we're involved in has to do with love.

Often that charity is manifested by order: order in our affections, loving the people and the things that we should love in first place: family values or family priorities.

We've heard this phrase, ‘Love in your heart was not put there to stay. Love is not love until you give it away’ (Letter, Oscar Hammerstein). Love is wanting life's best for another, even if that doesn't include us.

Whenever John Paul talked about love, he liked to talk about love as giving. It's all focused on giving, not on getting.

We can ask Our Lord for the grace to be more compassionate—with the compassion of Christ, compatior, and of His Mother. May we show others the love that He has shown to us.

Many years ago, I was living in a place called Belagua Fase Dos in Pamplona and every day there were about 100 university students. Every day after lunch, there was a get-together.

Everyone was supposed to attend the get-together, but of course, the get-together competes with the siesta. So usually there was about 30 percent attendance.

Occasionally, if there were an invited guest—a celebrity visiting town or a local professor, or somebody like that—the attendance would go up to about 50 percent.

One day in the year a lady was invited, and suddenly there was 100 percent attendance. It was the event of the year. It was historic. Nobody wanted to miss it.

This lady was a supernumerary lady who had eight children and she was a professor of psychology. When she started to speak at the get-together, she began to speak about what it meant to be a mother. I was wondering, ‘Did she get her topic wrong?’ because these guys are never going to be mothers.

But then I looked around the room and saw all the jaws were hanging open. They were all fascinated.

She talked about what it meant to be a mother. They all knew what a mother was, but it never crossed their mind for a moment to think about what it meant to be a mother.

She narrated some very homey details from her domestic life, saying she and her husband were both academicians, so they were a bit disordered by nature—one shoe here, one shoe there, sometimes the clothes on the back of the chair.

She said, “As our children grew, we began to realize that they were imitating our example. Our battle in our family life was to try and practice the virtues a little more—to put our two shoes together, to hang up our clothes.” Our whole get-together was full of these sorts of earthly details.

Then she said, “A mother has to try and be different things to her growing children at different stages of their development.

“To the two-year-old, she has to be the nappy changer, because that's one of the most crucial services that she has to provide.

“To the six-year-old, she has to be the mom who gets down on her hands and knees and plays with the dolls’ house or the Lego, or whatever it is.

“To the ten-year-old, she has to be the mom that puts on a bit of makeup or gets her hair done. When she comes to collect her ten-year-old son from school, he can dig the other guy in the ribs and say, ‘That's my mom over there, the good-looking one.’

“And to the 16-year-old,” she said, “she has to be the intellectual mom that keeps abreast of current affairs, maybe has a novel going; is able to keep up an intellectual conversation with her budding intellectual child, and doesn't give him the impression that the last time an idea went through her head was before she got married.”

Of course, this lady was panning out an amazing challenge of motherhood that was reminiscent of St. Paul's phrase that we have to try and be “all things to all men” (cf. 1 Cor. 9:22).

Of course, you can say the same thing about a father, and indeed about a grandfather; different roles.

“What can I contribute?” You've probably read Drucker's The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker, 1967), where he focuses on what makes people effective. He says they ask not just good questions, but the right questions.

And the right question is, “What can I contribute?” It's a very good question to ask in relation to our family, to our marriage, to our children, to our grandchildren, our grandnieces and nephews; keeps us very focused, keeps us oriented towards giving, towards being that effective person in our environment, in our home; and helps us to focus a lot on self-giving to others and a spirit of service.

“What can I contribute?” means “How can I serve?”

Our Father used to say that in Bethlehem and Nazareth, “nobody holds anything back” (cf. Josemaría Escrivá, Letter, February 14, 1974). We're beginning to look towards Bethlehem once again, perhaps planning this special Christmas, which has its own graces.

I don't know about you there, but certainly here, and particularly in the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, we are seeing a lot of very special things happening that can only be the result of grace.

The current difficulties are bringing their benefits with them. Our Lord invites us in our family to be there as one who serves. “I am among you,” He said in St. Luke, “as one who serves” (Luke 22:27).

I heard a professor in the Philippines say once that the purpose of education is service. The purpose of our formation is service, because Christ came “not to be served, but to serve” (Matt. 20:28).

We might think that in our home, at our age, in our situation, maybe we earn the privilege of being served, but Our Lord tells us otherwise. “The greatesFat must be the servant of all” (Mark 9:35).

The pathway of Christ is a pathway of service, also thanking God for all the good things He's given to us in our life, and possibly we take for granted.

There was a manager of a five-star hotel in Singapore a number of years ago who was a Catholic. He was a parishioner in a fairly prominent parish there that used to be run by Irish Jesuit priests.

This manager was changing the bedsheets of his hotels. He had a thousand bedsheets to give away. He asked the parish priest if he had any use for a thousand bedsheets, which he didn't, but he knew that I had moved here to Kenya. And so, that parish priest sent me a thousand bedsheets.

We distributed them in various places. But at that time, we had a technical school that was starting in a very depressed area of the city called Eastlands, and we had started a sort of a shelter for street kids. There are about 60,000 street kids on the streets of Nairobi. We had about maybe thirty or forty of them who would come there to sleep at night.

We gave them some of these bedsheets. A week or so later, I was chatting to one of these guys, maybe nine or ten years of age.

I asked him, “How are the bedsheets?” knowing that they had never had bedsheets before. And he said, “They're going very well, but I was wondering if, the next time, they could be black.”

I was sort of wondering, you know, why would you want black sheets? He said, “So they don't show the dirt.” Perfectly normal male psychology.

I told him, “I would try and transmit that message to the manager of the five-star hotel in Singapore and ask him if he wouldn't mind changing all his bedsheets to black.”

We could form a whole new culture of hospitality. If you go someplace and you find that there are black bedsheets, you may know where the idea is from.

But what was interesting was to see this little kid who'd never had these things before come up with this incredible idea.

When you hear stories like that, you sort of realize how many things in our home that we may take for granted and never even think about.

Our Lord, when He washed the feet of the apostles, said, “I've given you an example so that you may copy what I have done to you” (cf. John 13:15).

We have to copy that example in order to try and transmit that example and those values to many other people. Our children and our grandchildren are watching. They're learning. Our educative, informative role never ends.

The virtues that we try to put into practice in the home, over time, can yield incredible results. We might not see those results immediately, but very often they're there.

Father Joseph de Torre in the Philippines, who beforehand was in Ireland, wrote so many philosophy books. You may have seen some of them. He used to say that patience is a great social force.

I used to find that phrase very consoling: patience is a great social force. The seeds that we sow with our example take time to germinate. Maybe God wants to count on years, decades, maybe centuries, before all those seeds yield their abundant fruit.

There are many beautiful fruits we are seeing at the moment in this country from all the work of the Irish missionaries. The major schools in Kenya for the last century have been run by the Holy Spirit Fathers and by the Loreto Sisters.

Half the country has passed through those schools. Many heroic lives. Some of them are still alive—there's one who's 101; there's another who's 99—I see them from time to time; very inspiring examples.

But of course, the fruit of their lives—you see a lot of it is coming over time—a whole century of effort.

That's a bit of a story there because one of the first Loreto Sisters who came here in 1921, or shortly after, had fought in the Irish War of Independence.

Sister Theresa O'Sullivan, I think, was her name. It was after that, that she found her vocation as a Loreto nun, and then they sent her to Kenya to fight the British again, with all due respect to all the British.

She set up the first school for African girls in the whole of East Africa. You look back now and see what that meant—an incredible thing to have achieved. Now they tell all these stories, which are not very well known in the world.

But of course, a lot of these stories, and the seeds that have been sown, take an awful long time to yield all their abundant harvest.

In our families, the efforts that we make to practice those virtues will also yield their abundant fruit in due time.

But we have to keep focusing on the goal of our vocation—holiness in marriage—immersing ourselves in the Heart of Mary, in the Heart of Jesus, in the heart of Joseph, and working at being experts in this mission that God has given to us.

There was a guy in the formal final year of the school in Manila who was a very average student. But his achievement was way above his capacity in many ways. I think he had three sisters. He was an only son.

His father was a very busy businessman. He had a lot of important businesses, but somehow he was very close to his son.

We've heard our Father say many times that parents should try and be very good friends with their children (J. Escrivá, Conversations, Point 100).

It’s an easy thing to say, but in my experience, it's not such an easy thing to achieve.

Of all the people I've met in the last number of decades, I think this man managed it more than others. I asked him, ‘How did you manage this? What was the secret of your success?’

He told me, ‘You know, I gave up the cocktail circuit and I try to be home at six each evening. I spent about an hour chatting to my son, and so we're really buddy-buddies. We know what's going on in each other's lives. We're very close. My son eventually got into an Ivy League university in the States. He did very well.’

But then I asked the father, ‘But what gave you this motivation to have that focus, to spend so much time on your son and your family?’ This man was not a member of the Work. He was a cooperator, but not a very active one.

He told me, ‘I spent some time working on Wall Street and I got to know this Jew on Wall Street who was very successful. We became good friends.

‘One time he invited me one weekend to his home in upstate New York for the weekend. He brought me there and it took us about five minutes to get from the gate of the house to the house. That was because the car was breaking down. It was an incredible mansion.

Then he showed me room by room around this mansion. A beautiful place. Then we came to his bedroom and over his bed, there was a big poster, a big sign, that said, “The greatest failure of a man is to fail as a father.”

‘What this guy told me, you know, I was mesmerized, a bit perplexed. Here is this guy who's so successful professionally and he has a statement of failure over his bed.’

‘I asked him, What's this all about? He said, You see when I was on the up and up on Wall Street, I put my kids into boarding school, and then Christmas time came and I was very busy. So I just sort of left them there. Then the summertime came and the same thing, I sort of left them there also. This went on for a couple of years. And now, one of my kids is on drugs, and another one on something else, and a third one on something else.

He painted a not very savory picture. This Filipino father told me, ‘I came home, and I made out my own sign and I hung it over my own bed to remind myself, no matter how successful I may have become in all sorts of ways, the greatest failure was to fail as a father.’

Through the formation that we get in the Work, the ideas that we're constantly reminded about, we're helped to be a great success as a father.

Of course, the fruits of that effort may not be seen for many years to come. It may be a long time before all of those seeds yield their abundant fruit: fruits of our prayer, fruits of our sacrifice that you might not see in your children, but it might come in your grandchildren or in your great-grandchildren, but it will come, because we can have great faith that God repays “a hundredfold” (Mark 10:30).

“If you, evil as you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him?” (Matt. 7:11).

We can have great faith and trust in the graces that God is giving to us, in the apostolate of the family, of our marriage, of the role we play on the streets where we live, and the extended family that we belong to.

Often in the silent example we give when we practice our norms or we get to Mass, we try and live cheerfulness or that spirit of service in our home.

Our perseverance and loyalty in little things. We know that more is something that God wants to give us and that will come. He has great fruits prepared for our lives.

We can have a great confidence. We can thank God for the treasure of this vocation that He's given to us and maintain that sense of treasure in our married vocation and in our family.

I heard a story once of two guys who had stopped going to Mass on Sunday and they borrowed their father's car. They went for a drive in the mountains, and then they saw a man coming across the fields and he was handicapped; he was lame.

They were good guys, so they thought they'd stop and give him a lift. They took him into the car. It was a Sunday morning. They asked him where he was going. He was going to Mass and the church was still a few kilometers away.

This man was handicapped, so they brought him to the church. Then they weren't really doing anything special so they thought they should do the good thing and wait for him and give him a ride back afterwards.

They went into Mass. There was a priest hearing Confession; they went to Confession and got Communion. Then they gave the man a lift back afterwards to where they had picked him up, and he went off across the fields.

The story said he didn't say anything to these guys; didn't give out to them for not going to Mass regularly, or for the life they were leading, or all the funny ways they were living.

But what he did give them was the silent example of his faith, of his sacrifice, of his heroism, of his living out his Christian vocation in the way that God wanted him to live it.

We never know, in the place where God has placed us, how He's using us to sow the seeds that He wants to sow in the souls of the people that He's placed around you.

Hopefully, we'll live to see, or see from heaven, the great fruits that are going to come from there: the evangelization of culture, the civilization of love—all these marvelous goals that Pope St. John Paul, whose feast day we celebrate tomorrow, has placed before us—the culture of life—in spite of the difficulties, in spite of all the chips being down.

If you read about the early Christians and the environment that they had to put up with, all the time, things seem to be becoming more and more similar.

But yet we know we have great things to look forward to. Don Álvaro talked about the new flourishing of the Church, the new flourishing of the family (Álvaro del Portillo, Talk, Priests for a New Evangelization). We're bringing that about little by little in the ordinary things that we’re doing.

In relation to St. Benedict, an author liked to say, “External monotony is an invitation to inner change, whereas novelty and constant variety short-circuit the process of going deeper” (Michael Casey, Truthful Living: St. Benedict's Teaching on Humility).

The period that we may be living through in society or in our own personal life might precisely be a period of external monotony, but yet carrying with it great graces for future change.

Our Lord gives great dignity to family life. He wants us to create that atmosphere, to think about it, to become experts, aristocrats, in this whole business of the family, seeing what we can contribute, how we can help other families, and encouraging them with our words, with our deeds; sometimes just by listening, understanding, excusing, forgiving, working on that business of communication in marriage.

There's a couple in Singapore who told me that they have organized the marriage preparation course for about twenty-five years.

They told me that every week or every month, they have a timeout, and they sit down, and they write down all the things that have annoyed them in the previous week or so.

Little statements, little things that happened, things that may be difficult to express verbally—they write them down. They spend a bit of time doing this and then they swap papers. They read what the other person has written down, and then they apologize and begin again.

It's great to have little habits like that, whereby we can train other people to grow, to build up great families, great marriages, so that, as Stenson says, we can “build up great human beings” (cf. James Stenson, Talk, Educating in Virtue), people who can take their place in the world and in the Church, and do wonderful things for the future, knowing that the grace of God is working in all sorts of ways.

I was at the 60th anniversary of a Loreto nun last year, an Irish Loreto nun from Armagh. An amazing character.

She talks about how when she was six in her kindergarten school, a priest came to give them a talk. He was an Irish priest missionary in Africa talking to six-year-old kids. He asked them to pray for all the little children in Africa who didn't know Jesus.

Now you might think that talking to six-year-old kids—things go in one ear and out the other. But this little girl took this very seriously.

Now, after being sixty years in Kenya, she talks about how ‘that was the beginning of my vocation.’

She said, ‘Later in life, I went to look for that priest to find out who he was. He must have been an SMA or a Holy Spiritan or somebody, but we couldn't find him.’

She often remembers the faith of that priest going to talk to those six-year-olds.

She went home and asked her mom—the priest asked them if the last decade of the Rosary every night could be for the little children in Africa who don't know Jesus.

So she went home and asked her mother, and the mother said, ‘No, the last decade is for the Pope. But it could be the second last decade.’

They began to say the second last decade for the little children in Africa who didn't know Jesus.

God works all sorts of miracles in the souls and the minds of little children who are watching, who are listening.

We can have great faith in all the things our vocation tells us about the apostolate of marriage and of the family that we're involved in, how God is using us in a special way at every stage of our existence.

Nothing is lost. We're “sowing peace and joy.” We're creating “bright and cheerful homes” (J. Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Points 30, 78). We're creating family fun. We're helping people to rediscover the important things.

Hopefully, little by little, we're spreading all those things all over the world.

I'm always very moved when here in Kenya, or also in Singapore and in Manila, people talk about how indebted they are to the education they've received from their Irish teachers, nuns, and priests.

In Ireland, we don't know half the stories, incredible things that have been done in the last century. An awful lot to be proud of.

All of that started with prayer in the family, with great families, great mothers and fathers, and maybe grandfathers and grandmothers.

Now that baton has been passed to each one of us.

We can ask Our Lady, that she might help us to focus a little more on this great goal of quality in family life that Our Lord and our Father have entrusted to us.

We can say, Mary, Queen of the family, pray for us and pray for our family apostolate.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

BWM