St. Joseph, the Family Man

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.

With the permission of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, we continue with this period of prayer in front of Our Lord exposed in the Blessed Sacrament, in this recollection just before the Feast of St. Joseph, in which we focus very much on the Holy Patriarch.

One of the events that took place in Our Lord's life was when He got lost for three days—three long days. Eventually, He was found in the temple. We’re told that Our Lady and St. Joseph were looking for Him all over the place (Luke 2:41-45).

I don't know if you’ve ever lost a child, but I remember seeing a mother once who lost her child on a beach. The child had just been lost for half an hour and the mother was almost hysterical.

Our Lord allowed Joseph and Mary to be looking for Him for three long days and nights. It was a long time.

When they found Him, they were very happy, but they were also disturbed. Our Lady said to Jesus, “Son, why have you done this to us? Did you not know your father and I were seeking you anxiously?” (Luke 2:48).

Notice how Our Lady says, “Your father and I.” The dignity of Our Lady, her role, her mission is way above that of St. Joseph, but yet in this instance, she places St, Joseph first, rather interestingly—respect for Joseph as father of the family. “Your father and I have been seeking you sorrowfully.”

Our Lord replies, saying, “Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?” (Luke 2:49). This is a pretty tough answer, really.

The parents who have been seeking Him for three days, and then, “Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?”

We’re told, “They did not understand the words that he spoke to them” (Luke 2:50).

It is not surprising that they did not understand. They have been sorrowfully looking for Him for three days and then He comes out with this rather unusual statement: “Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?”

We are told that Joseph and Mary did not understand, but they kept silent. We’re told in other places that Mary “kept all these things carefully in her heart” (Luke 2:19, 51).

Joseph also must have kept many things carefully in his heart—things he was seeing, things he was hearing, all sorts of lights from the Holy Spirit that gave him an inkling of the greatness of what was taking place before his eyes—the Mystery of the Incarnation.

And yet Joseph is silent.

One of the great things we can learn from St. Joseph is to be more silent, to think about things, perhaps not to react immediately.

He could have exploded in those moments. He could have said to Our Lord, Don't talk to your mother like that, which any human person might have expressed. But he has the faith and humility to take this blow a little bit, to realize there is something else here. We have to pray a bit about this, we have to sleep on it, we have to chew on it.

One of the great messages that St. Joseph gives us is this silence. None of his words are recorded for posterity.

“The Holy Family then went back to Nazareth” and we’re told, “Jesus grew daily in wisdom, in age, in grace before God and men” (Luke 2:51-52).

St. Josemaría liked to give a lot of importance to the fact that Our Lord spent thirty years of hidden life, family life,, in Nazareth. Jesus communicates a great sense of importance to the family.

He had three years of public life but He had thirty years of family life. We presume for most of those St. Joseph was present.

St. Joseph is given a great formative role. If you’re involved with families, or if you’re educating children or forming them in different ways, St. Joseph can be a great helper. He formed the child Jesus in virtue, in wisdom, in age, in grace before God and men.

There is an educationalist in the States who says that parents have to repeat things five hundred times for their children before they get them on the 501st.

If you are involved in forming children, you may find you have to repeat things hundreds of times before the child understands. That can be quite exasperating, but it can be very sanctifying.

Our Lord was “like us in all things but sin” (cf. Heb 4:15). Like any child, He knew everything already with His divine nature, but He had to learn things with His human nature: to learn how to speak, to learn how to make tables, to learn how to be a carpenter. Joseph was there to teach Him all of these things.

Later on, Our Lord is going to do a lot of teaching, and in His teaching, He is going to use examples that possibly He learned with Joseph: the grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies (John 12:24-26); the shepherd that goes to look after the lost sheep (Matt. 18:10-14).

Possibly as they walked in the field some day, Joseph pointed out these little things to Jesus which were later on going to be very important in His preaching.

Joseph has a great formative role. In the formative role that God places in our life where we form other people in virtue, we can ask him to help us in this.

“Joseph taught Our Lord to walk, taking Him by the hand; he was for Jesus like a father who raises an infant to his cheeks, bending down to Him and feeding Him. He was a tender and loving father” (Pope Francis, Apostolic Letter, Patris Corde, Dec. 8, 2020).

A great family man. A sensitivity for the family. St. Joseph wants each one of us to have that same type of sensitivity for those things—family values. Family values are family priorities. Families come first.

We are in the business of forming families. The Second Vatican Council liked to talk about the family as the domestic Church (Lumen gentium, Point 11). That's a great phrase, the domestic Church.

St. Joseph is the patron of the universal Church (Pope Pius IX, Quemadmodum Deus, 1870). If he is the patron of the Church, in a very special way he is the patron of the domestic Church.

Now that's a very loaded phrase because the Church is what forms us, takes care of our soul, and helps us to look forward to the eternal wedding feast.

Likewise in the domestic Church, we have to try and foster those ideas, the spiritual formation that we give to young people—a formation that possibly they’re going to remember forever.

I often think that the prayers that a child learns for their First Communion will be the prayers they say on their death bed. And so, that early formation is very important—to learn the commandments: Thou shalt not tell a lie. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness.

St. Joseph was a great family man, building that family, taking care of that family, leading it forward to be the family that God had destined it to be for all eternity—the Holy Family.

All the time. Our Lord was formed in the virtues that He was going to exhibit on His way to Calvary.

Christ was a very tough man. He hung for three long hours on the Cross. He fell down with the Cross, but He got up again. He fell again, and He got up again.

We could think of that toughness, that fortitude, as being something that He must have learned from Joseph.

After the birth of Christ, in the second dream, the angel tells Joseph, “Get up, take the child and His Mother and flee into Egypt, and remain there until I tell you” (Matt. 2:13).

God treats Joseph pretty roughly. If ever we were to feel that God has treated me roughly in my life, maybe we're in good company. Joseph didn't have an easy ride.

The angel was always appearing to him in his sleep. He could have said to the angel, ‘Look, there are sixteen hours of the waking day. Can't you come to me at some other moment?’

But Joseph has the patience to accept the will of God in all the ways that it comes to him.

The angel asked him to react quickly:”Get up, take the child and His Mother, and flee into Egypt.” Don't wait until tomorrow. Don't sleep on it. Don't wait until you feel good, you feel right, and you feel prepared. Just go. There's an army of maybe a thousand soldiers or a hundred soldiers that are coming looking for you.

It's not a very comfortable way to fly to another country. But Joseph did not hesitate to obey.

Another example of Joseph's humility is expressed in his obedience: obedience to the will of God, to what God asks of him.

You see, obedience is submitting our will to the will of somebody else. Sometimes that can be very difficult. But sometimes when we submit our will to the will of somebody else, we do our greatest job.

At the Oscars in Hollywood a couple of years ago, there was a lady who won an Oscar, an actress, and she went up to accept the Oscar. Normally, they give a little speech of thanksgiving.

She said, ‘You know, when this role in this movie came along, I didn't like it. I felt it wasn't me. It wasn't my personality. It's not the sort of role that I was created to fulfill.’ She had a whole pile of reasons not to accept this role.

She said, ‘You see,’ she said, ‘I hadn't worked for two years. My agent told me, ‘Louise, take the job and be quiet.’ Except he used different words that I can't use in this meditation. She said, ‘I took the job and here I am. I won the Oscar.’

Sometimes when we accept the roles that are given to us, even though we don't like this job, or we don't feel like doing it, or we don't think it's the right thing to do, or a whole series of other human reasons, very often that's when we do our best job.

We do what we're asked to do. We do what we're told. We make our boss happy. We live obedience. Because very often that's what we're here for: to do what we're asked to do, to bend our will.

In Joseph, we find a great example of obedience, which must have been difficult because he didn't see the why. Why should I go to Bethlehem? Why should we go to Egypt?

We don't find Joseph like a four-year-old child saying, Why? Why? Mommy, why? Daddy, why? No, no, he just silently accepts what he's asked to do.

A little girl was visiting her neighbor's house and she told the neighbor, ‘You know, I think my mother doesn't know anything about raising children.’ The neighbor said, ‘How is that?’

The little girl said, ‘Well, because she tells me to go to bed when I'm not tired, and she tells me to get up when I am tired.’ The little girl, with her human reasoning, didn't quite get what her mother was asking.

Sometimes we don't fully see or understand the why of what we're asked to do. But just the fact that we're asked to do it, that's reason enough to try and do it. We might have to question it a little bit, but then we go and do it.

God revealed His plans, His saving plans to Joseph, and God did so by using dreams. Normally we don't have to pay too much attention to our dreams. We live in the real world.

But he was very clear there was an angel that appeared to him. That was the way God made His will known.

Joseph gets the message. His response is immediate. We're told he woke from sleep and he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him (Matt. 2:14).

His obedience allows him to overcome all the obstacles and the difficulties. It's part of the protection of Our Lady that God has planned.

Then he's told to go to Egypt and remain there until the death of Herod. “Until I tell you, remain there.”

An awful lot of our life involves “remaining there” in this job, in this place, in this family; with this sickness, or this difficulty, or this financial situation. God has placed us there and He says, Remain there, hang in there, live with this little difficulty that I've allowed in your life.

Maybe it's a sickness, maybe it's an inconvenience, maybe it's a lack of material things, but that's the will of God for me. It's here I have to learn to be happy. It's here I have to learn to see that this is what God wants of me.

Joseph in Bethlehem could have said, ‘What am I doing here in this stable? All my friends have a much better place for their fiancées to give birth than in this stable.’ Or, ‘All I have is a donkey. All my friends now have a motorbike.’

He could have come up with all these comparisons with his friends, people of his age, or people who were my classmates.

But he wasn't thinking along those sorts of lines. If we look at our situation from a purely human perspective, we don't get the full picture.

Sometimes you have to look from a supernatural perspective. What's the will of God for me? What are the blessings that He's given to me?

If we were to spend our whole day thanking God for the blessings that He gives us, we wouldn't have enough time in the day to do so.

We see people maybe who don't have limbs, don't have an arm or a leg, can't walk, and yet God has given us our four limbs and maybe our health, and our energy, and our job, and our this and our that, and clothes on our back.

We should thank God a million times every day for the blessings that He's given to us. That's the reality. That's the truth.

Sometimes the devil leads us to ‘look at all the things that other people have that I don't have.’ And we can want them and desire them.

We might see all the good things that other people have, but we don't see their crosses. We don't see their worries.

Like St. Joseph, we have to try and learn how to be content with what we have—content with the vocation God has given to me, with where He's placed me, content with knowing how to be where we are.

“Remain there until I tell you.” In the lives of each one of us, God has also said the same thing to us that He said to St. Joseph: Remain there, be there, learn how to be happy.

There's a phrase or a point in The Way (Point 631) where St. Josemaría says, “Be content with what enables you to lead a simple and sober life.” Those are rather interesting words. “Be content.” How many people do you know in your life who are content?

Most of the people we know, they want this or they want that or they want to be somewhere else, or they want to change here or there. We can all find something to be discontented about.

Our Lord bids us to learn how to be content with what we have. If there are things we don't have, possibly Our Lord is using that situation to make us more Christ-like, more like Joseph and Mary, who didn't have this and didn't have that, who knew how to do without things, who knew how to find their profound happiness in fulfilling the will of God.

In their journey to Egypt, they were like the patron saint of refugees or immigrants—people who have to go to another country and start again with a new job.

Joseph had no job when he went to Egypt; no security, no house, no salary, no friends, no support, no nothing.

If we find ourselves starting new in some place, we can ask St. Joseph. He's been there before. He'll open the doors for us—or at least he'll give us peace and serenity.

He faced this situation with resignation, with enthusiasm. “He got up, took the child and His Mother by night, went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod.”

He waited with patient trust for the angel to come and tell them it was safe to return home. We don't know how long that was because that's not been revealed. It could have been months, it could have been years.

But they knew how to wait. Patience. Patience with the plans of God in our life.

God is at work. He's doing different things—maybe with our blood family, maybe with our future, maybe with our health, in all sorts of ways. Patient trust.

When the angel appeared, again he promptly obeyed. “He got up and he took the child and His mother and went to the land of Israel” (Matt. 2:21).

During the return journey, we're told,”When Joseph heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in the place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there” (Matt. 2:22).

The angel told him to get up and go to the land of Israel, but he didn't give him directions, to say, ‘Look, follow your Google Maps and wait till I tell you where to turn left and where to turn right.

No, he just gave him a general sort of push in a certain direction, but left an awful lot up to his initiative.

Joseph had to keep his ear to the ground. “When he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in the place of his father Herod...” he knew that wasn't a good sign, that wasn't a good thing.

God left a lot up to his freedom, to his correspondence. He wanted him to use his brains, to use his intelligence.

In our Christian vocation, God also wants us to use all the human means He's given us. He may direct us in a certain direction, but He doesn't want us to go there with our eyes closed, or thinking, Duh, just go this way, duh, that's what the angel told me.

He wants us to think, to have initiative, to have an antenna up to see what God's saying to me here, what the Holy Spirit's saying to me there, to learn from other people, to learn from their experience.

Joseph was awake, he was focused, he was thinking, he was planning, he was responsible, he had initiative, he was thinking all the time about Our Lady and the child Jesus.

“...he was afraid to go there. After being warned in a dream”—now for the fourth time—“he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth” (Matt. 2:22-23).

This whole story is a great story of Joseph corresponding to his vocation, saying yes to what God asked of him in difficult circumstances, all the time seeing the hand of God behind the things that are happening.

Because of that, he's silent, he's peaceful, he's serene, he's full of joy. When we fulfill the plans of God, God gives us deep joy in our lives. We see the fruits of what's happening around us. We see the fruits of our apostolate.

There was a moment when Our Lady and St. Joseph brought the child Jesus to the temple to present Him in the temple, and up to now they've heard stories of joy. The shepherds brought a story of joy, the Magi brought a story of joy (Luke 2:13-18, Matt. 2:10-11).

But now they meet Simeon, and Simeon talks to Our Lady and mentions to her about how there's going to be “a sword that's going to pierce her soul”—which in modern language means your heart is going to be broken. (Luke 2: 25-35).

It's the first message they hear of the Cross.

You see, the Cross was there also in the life of Joseph, of Mary, of the child Jesus. We are preparing ourselves for Easter, for Holy Week, for Lent. It's very appropriate that we're a bit focused on the Cross.

John Paul II used to say that in Christ we find the meaning and the purpose of our life.

Very specifically, we could say we find the meaning and the purpose of our life in Christ on the Cross. These are weeks to focus on the Cross in our prayer, and to see how Joseph and Mary accepted the Cross.

“Your own soul, a sword will pierce.” That must have given them plenty of food for thought.

Simeon foretells the Cross, and so Joseph knows that this child is being prepared for something very special. The Cross is coming.

He has a role to prepare this child for the Cross, to be tough on the Cross, to be generous, to accept the will of God, to be obedient to the Cross, even when Jesus is going to say to Himself, “Father, let this chalice pass from me; yet not my will, rather yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

Maybe it's from Joseph that He learns to accept the will of God even when it's difficult. Joseph sees that I have to prepare this Christ child for the Cross, to be tough, to be demanding, to have an inner fortitude.

Each of us has to have that same inner fortitude and accept the Cross in whatever way it may come to us.

Jesus learned all this at the school of Joseph—to do the will of the Father even when it cost.

Christ was going to say, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (John 4:34). We have to learn how to do the will of God.

There was an Irish lady once who gave an awful lot of money to Catholic charities in her life. The story was that she died and she went to heaven and she found her name was not on the Book of Life. She told the gatekeeper in heaven, ‘Look, I gave an awful lot of money to Catholic charities in my life and now my name is not on the Book of Life. I think there's been some mistake here. Can you tell St. Patrick to come out here? I'd like to have a word with him.’

St. Patrick comes out and she has a word with St. Patrick and says, ‘Look, I gave an awful lot of money to Catholic charities in my life and now my name is not on the Book of Life. Can you do something for me? I think there's been some mistake.’

St. Patrick goes inside and says, ‘I'll talk to the higher ups, I'll see what I can do.’ He goes inside, talks to St. Peter, and after some time he comes back to her and says, ‘Look, I'm sorry, but the best we can do is to give you your money back.’

“Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matt 7:21).

As we move towards Holy Week, we could ask St. Joseph that we too in our life might learn how to accept the will of God and to fulfill that will.

It's not just a question of giving this here, and giving that there, maybe giving things that we find comfortable to give or that cost us a little bit.

God has a will for us, a plan, and wants us to follow that plan, to get the message very clearly of what He's asking of us, no matter what that may cost, so that even at the most difficult moments of our life, like Christ in Gethsemane we can learn how to do the Father's will: “obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8).

St. Joseph was called by God to serve the person and the mission of Jesus.

If you have young children entrusted to your care, or a home or a family, you're also entrusted with the care of those people, of their formation, that hopefully they see virtue in you—charity, patience, peace, humility, industriousness, honesty, love, so many things—that they have a right to see in us as examples, saints, that the domestic Church has to form saints for the future.

It's one of the reasons why God gave us St. Joseph as one of the patrons of the domestic Church, to form future saints like Joseph formed future people.

Joseph accepted Our Lady unconditionally, lock, stock, and barrel, whatever the life of Mary was going to bring with it—and it brought an awful lot of complications.

But he was generous. He gave himself completely; it was a commitment of love. He was totally committed to Our Lady.

We have to try and be totally committed to what God has asked us to do. Often in life, things may happen that we don't understand. Our immediate reaction might be disappointment or rebellion.

Joseph had plenty of opportunity for those, but we find he accepts the will of God with peace and serenity, all the time forgetting about himself.

It's a phrase that St. Josemaría repeats very frequently in his writings, which is, “Forget yourself” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Points 97, 861; Furrow, Points 793, 947).

If you look at St. Joseph all the time, he's forgetting himself.

We conquer our own self-love. You see, the greatest obstacle in our spiritual life is that I love myself too much—egoism, selfishness.

We might do things for other people, but often, if the truth were told, it's done 20, 30 percent for other people, maybe 70 percent because there's something in it for me. The goal of our spiritual life is to stand on that self-love.

A lady used to come to spiritual direction in another country. I told her that every time you come for spiritual direction, try and get one idea.

From our five or ten-minute conversation, try and go away with one idea; and after twenty short sessions of spiritual direction, you'll have twenty ideas that can shape your life.

She began to do that. One time she came to me and said, ‘Father, you know last week when we were chatting, the one idea I came was a phrase that you said that the ego must go.’

I had never remembered saying any such thing. Sometimes people pick up things in spiritual direction and you wonder where they came from. But it's the Holy Spirit working.

She said, ‘The following day after Mass, I was having breakfast with some friends of mine and we were joined by some other friends who weren't Catholic. One of them was a Buddhist, and then everybody got up to go, because they had to go home or go to work, and I was left with this Buddhist friend of mine. We were chit-chatting for a while and suddenly in the conversation she said, You know, the ego must go.’

And she said, ‘You know, I always knew the Holy Spirit works through spiritual direction, but when I got exactly the same message from this Buddhist lady within 24 hours, I really felt the Holy Spirit was working overtime.’

One of the goals of our spiritual life is that we conquer the ego, that self-love that's there inside us. That's what's called pride. Ask St. Joseph that you might know the expressions of your pride. Fast temper is fast pride. Excessive sensitivity is fast pride.

The opposite, and the solution, is humility, so that we might learn how to be humble like Joseph was humble, hiding away and disappearing, being silent, not attracting attention to himself, serving—and serving, not with resignation, but with hope and courage, leaving a great message for the whole of humanity through the virtues that he practiced.

At the end of this recollection, you can tell Our Lady that we want to be a little bit more focused on her spouse during these hours and days.

Our Lady and Our Lord must be very happy when they see us giving time and attention to St. Joseph, whom they love so much. They must be very grateful when they see us focusing a lot on St. Joseph, learning a lot from him because there's so much to learn.

We could ask Our Lady that we might come a little closer to her spouse in this special year of St. Joseph and come to love him a little, more just like she did.

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.

EW