St. Joseph’s Holiness in Ordinary Life

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.

“‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, brother of James and Joseph and Jude and Simon? And are not also his sisters here with us?’ And they were scandalized in regard to him” (Mark 6:3).

This meditation is about St. Joseph's holiness in ordinary life and work.

We're reminded about how St. Joseph was a very ordinary person and about our own personal vocation in the middle of the world as ordinary laypeople.

Every week in the Circle we are asked, “Did I try to avoid anything annoying or odd, out of keeping with my duties and position?” A lot of emphasis is placed on our ordinariness, on being very normal and being very balanced. St. Joseph can be a special patron saint of ours in that regard.

It's interesting how our Father had a spiritual sweet tooth when it came to St. Joseph. I remember a person in a get-together with Don Álvaro referring to the fact that our Father used to say how good Joseph is, que bueno es José!

This fellow asked, “Por que nuestro Padre decía que San José era bueno?” It's a very sort of simple childlike question. Why did our Father say that Joseph was good?

Don Álvaro reacted in the same way that our Father did on many occasions: by thanking that person for asking that question so a to give him the opportunity to talk about St. Joseph. You could see that everything related to St. Joseph gave our Father great joy.

Likewise, we're called to have that same spiritual sweet tooth. I'm really happy to look to him, to thank God for this year of St. Joseph, to have this desire to gain all the indulgences we can during this particular year, on this particular day, and to keep looking at the life of St. Joseph from many different aspects.

He gives us great lessons because of his ordinariness—father of a family, a worker who earned his living with the effort of his hands. All these things are very relevant for us: very ordinary things, very ordinary people with ordinary responsibilities in the middle of the world.

Our Father, in Christ Is Passing By, says, “St. Joseph was an ordinary sort of man on whom God relied to do great things” (Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 40).

On the one hand, you had his ordinariness, but on the other hand, you had his calling to greatness.

One of the messages that we have for ordinary families, parents, and ordinary people is precisely their calling to greatness. James Stenson in some of his books talks about how mothers and fathers of families have to try and live like great human beings, so that their children see what that means, to live as a great human being.

Their children grow up wanting to be great human beings, and living in that way, which means practicing virtue, because they've seen it practiced. They’ve put it into practice in ordinary ways and concrete realities. Our Lord is also relying on us to do great things.

The news we got last night about the expansion of the region sort of makes you think in all sorts of ways. We're no longer thinking about Nyeri and Nakuru, but Malawi and Botswana and so many other places. Mauritius suddenly comes onto the horizon.

So, we know that Our Lord wants to rely on us to do great things with our fidelity, with our correspondence, in the same way that He relied on St. Joseph, on his ordinariness, and with him just putting one foot in front of the other, discerning what is the will of God at this particular moment, in this particular place.

What does God want me to do? What virtues does He want me to put into practice? Then, setting out to fulfill that, launching out into the deep with faith, with daring, with heroism at times, with constancy.

We're told in Christ Is Passing By, “He did exactly what the Lord wanted him to do, in each and every event that went to make up his life.” It's very simple, but yet very profound, very ordinary. It's exactly what the Lord wanted him to do.

We come to our prayer in a regular way, and we ask Our Lord, Domine, ut videam! Lord, that I may see! What is it that you want me to do? What is the decision that you want me to make? Where do you want me to place my investments on the scales? What particular things do you want me to choose in this particular moment, so that I choose the path of life that you want for me?

“That is why,” St. Josemaría says, “Scripture praises Joseph as ‘a just man.’” It's probably one of the greatest compliments that Scripture could have given to Joseph, to call him a just man (Matt. 1:19): a man united to God, in unison with him, in the state of grace, a virtuous person. There's no greater praise that the Old Testament can give to any person than that (Gen. 6:9).

He says, “In Hebrew, a just man means a good and faithful servant of God, someone who fulfills the divine will, or who is honorable and charitable towards his neighbor.” We need to be somebody great, and that's what's involved: to be honorable and charitable towards our neighbor. Be a person of integrity.

In the Irish newspapers, the last day or so, the great scandal, because one of the major stockbrokers in the country who had been there for fifty years, some of the top executives ran away with an awful lot of money. You find this happening everywhere. If the human person doesn't have formation, doesn't live a supernatural life, and is not living a unity of life, everybody ends up being a crook and a thief.

We're here to change that reality. Don Javier said to people in Nigeria at the get-together, “Opus Dei has come to change the way the world does business." This is what we're involved in, so that everybody, in their work and their professions, is honorable and charitable towards their neighbor and fulfills their duties of justice.

“A just man is someone who loves God and proves his love,” said our Father, “by keeping God's commandments and directing his whole life toward the service of his brothers, his fellow men.”

It's very simple, it's very ordinary, but there can be great temptations against that in many areas of professional life. We have this great model before us so that we can look to him and learn from him how to put these virtues into practice.

That may lead us to stand out among our colleagues. That means also that we have to have a desire to grow in our formation and our professional work; with the passage of time to carry it out a little better, to leave a great legacy.

It may be that many of the things we have done professionally in our life will pass away, but possibly the greatest thing we will leave after us is that example. A lot of the tables and chairs that Joseph made in the course of his life didn't last—they must have faded away or they got burnt or they went back to being dust or a whole pile of other things—but his example, his reputation, has lasted down through the centuries. That's what we're trying to build.

In his ordinariness, there must have been a great maturity—maturity as a human person to take on the tasks that God placed before him, to handle them very well; maturity that meant putting into practice all the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

When weight is lacking in our life, there's a tendency to want to fill up that lack with external noise, with the emptiness of a dissatisfied heart. We see that around us all the time.

We're told in The Way (Point 17), “Don't succumb to that disease of character whose symptoms are a general lack of seriousness, unsteadiness in action and speech, foolishness—in a word, frivolity. And that frivolity, mind you, which makes your plan so void (‘so filled with emptiness’), will make of you a lifeless and useless dummy, unless you react in time—not tomorrow, but now!”

We see the life of Joseph, and yet we don't see any frivolity. We see him as very manly because he's mature. After all, he's able to take on this great enterprise that God is asking of him. He's in good shape.

All of our formation and all of our virtues lead us in that same direction, ready to take on in our ordinariness the great plans that God may have placed in front of us.

We see him these days inviting us to lift our eyes and look at different horizons. The field is ripe for the harvest. This fact also, he says, has for us a meaning that is the reason for reflection and joy.

We look at St. Joseph's life and we find plenty of scope there for our reflection and also for our joy. Our joy, because Joseph is so good, so manly, so ordinary, but also so holy. We're told also in Christ Is Passing By (Point 43) that “love brings joy, but a joy whose roots are in the shape of a cross.”

The life of Joseph wasn't easy. It was full of rejection. There was no room for them at the inn. The doors were closed in his face. They had to find some small little stable on the outskirts. He had to take the Child and His Mother and flee into Egypt, rejection by the local governor, rejection by society, rejection by his country. “Go to Egypt and remain there” (Matt. 2:13).

Very powerful words in the Gospel: “remain there.” An awful lot of his holiness was tied up, and ordinariness, in that “remaining there” just doing the ordinary things, fulfilling your duty in the ordinary situations, and also not knowing how long that was going to last.

“Remain there until I tell you.” Part of the ordinariness of our life is that we don't know how long this situation is going to last. There's a certain uncertainty.

Abraham was told, “Go to a land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). Abraham is sort of the man of the moment these days because the Holy Father is there, yesterday or today, the birthplace of Abraham in Ur.

That uncertainty about the future is part of the ordinariness of ordinary life. “As long as we are on earth,” continued our Father, “and have not yet arrived at the fullness of the future life, we can never have true love without sacrifice and pain. This pain becomes sweet and lovable. It is the source of interior joy” (Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 43).

St. Paul in the Second Reading today talks about “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23), crucified in the ordinary things. “But,” our Father says, “it is an authentic pain, for it involves overcoming one's own selfishness and taking love as the rule of each and everything we do.”

Joseph put love into practice, showed that he was a just man, showed his authentic love for Mary in forgetting all about himself. “Love is deeds, not sweet words” (Josemaría Escrivá, Friends of God, Point 72).

He was willing to put her away privately at whatever the cost; it didn't matter what was going to happen to him. In a very ordinary way, he shows the fullness of love, forgets about himself, takes love as the rule of everything that he does.

In this way, he becomes a model of great holiness in ordinary life, in work, in family life, in adversities, in joys, and in the little things of every day. It wasn't just that he had a holiness, but he had a great holiness.

I think it was Leo XIII who wrote many apostolic letters on St. Joseph. He gets to talk a lot about the dignity of Joseph—how, after Our Lady in heaven, he's the number one saint after that. He occupies a very special place.

He was a man of solid virtue and character; solved his problems in prayer and patience. We're told “he was mindful to put her away privately” (Matt. 1:19)—“mindful,” a scriptural phrase for “prayerful.”

Then God comes to his aid, not just on that occasion, but on many occasions. He was a person who worked, who suffered, who cared for Jesus and His Mother, put his whole life at their disposal—all of his ingenuity, all of his talent.

God also relied on that ordinary talent that was there. He had to work out a lot of the details. Everything wasn't laid out in front of him, yet he used his abilities, his thinking process, and many things, his initiative. He showed initiative and responsibility in all that he was asked to do.

Our Lord must have been eternally grateful for this person that God had given Him from heaven. He must have wanted to give Joseph a great heaven because of his correspondence.

That's why many Fathers of the Church think that after Our Lady, he's the greatest. Together with Our Lady and Our Lord, he forms the Trinity on earth.

He would have taught Our Lord many basic things: to work, to read, to write. He would have taught Him manly manners, ways of speaking that He was going to use later on in the parables.

“You gave me no kiss of greeting...no basin to wash my feet” (Luke 7:44-45). Our Lord was well brought up. He was used to the details of hospitality. When they were lacking, He noticed them in good manners that He must have learned from Our Lady and St. Joseph.

The Gospels say very little about this great man, except that he was silent. He was energetic, able to go here, to go there, full of dynamism. He was loving. He was capable of planning, of making judgments, to go now, immediately by night, and not to go, to wait in Egypt, to be patient.

Probably he died before the public life of Our Lord began, because we don't hear anything else about him after that, after they get lost in the temple (Luke 2:41-52).

No single word of his has reached us. But somehow the word of Joseph is present in Jesus, in his toughness, in his manliness, in his fortitude. He would have learned all these things from the virtues of Joseph, in the holiness that He saw every day.

Joseph, to a large extent, passes unnoticed in Scripture. But that doesn't mean that he was inactive. He was hidden, but he was very effective—a great model for our effectiveness, hidden in silence, but yet hopefully effective in our work, in our family life, in our virtue, in our service of others.

We can try to grow more each day in union with God, like Joseph did, in the correspondence that He asks of us, in the faithful fulfillment of our ordinary duties.

“A little act done for love,” said our Father, “is worth so much” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, Point 814). In all the life of Joseph, we see many of those little actions done for love.

These days and weeks and hours can be a time to deepen our interior life to seek God, especially in the times that we dedicate exclusively to Him, that period of meditation each day, or the presence of God that we try to practice throughout the day. You can try to grow in the human and in the supernatural, for the glory of God and the good of men.

Joseph must have heard with great joy the things the shepherds told him as it comes from the angels, great tidings, “good tidings of great joy, which will be to all the people” (Luke 2:10), the work of St. Gabriel, all the people. Joseph must have dreamt of all the great things that were going to come from this Christ Child, Divine Beauty Incarnate.

Our Lord tried to resemble Joseph in the way he worked, in the traits of his character, in the way he spoke. Jesus must have loved him so much.

Our Father loved Joseph so much that he said that in the last years of his life, his love grew in an impetuous manner. Each day that went by, he loved him with a new impetus that was capable of overcoming all difficulties.

It’s very logical that our Father would want us to renew our commitment on the day of St. Joseph. He loved that word: commitment, committed.

A guy once was doing a Master's in CRC, and he crossed with one of the priests of the Work in a corridor in the early afternoon. This guy was from Canada. He had no religion.

He happened to say to this priest, Father Raynal, “You know, I'm very impressed with this place. It's the atmosphere of work.”

But that didn't quite express what he wanted to say. He was fishing around for the word that would be more exact. He said, “It's the atmosphere of silence.” It was the early afternoon period.

But still, that didn't grasp the idea, the sentiment that he wanted to express. Finally, he said, “It's the atmosphere of commitment.” What a beautiful word, a great compliment.

We around us have to create also an atmosphere of commitment, something that people should notice. There's something different about us. There's a Dutch missionary priest in Singapore who has baptized sixty adults every Easter—Singaporean Chinese— and would tell them, “Now that you're Catholic, you have to be different. You can't be the same as everybody else. We're here to be different, to change the world.”

One of the ways we change the world is with the atmosphere of commitment that we bring with us, a commitment that we learn from the Holy Patriarch, of seriousness, of maturity, of manliness.

God asked St. Joseph for something very big and asked him to change all his own plans. He had the mission of covering up the miraculous maternity of his wife. Big things are carried out in a very ordinary way.

It was necessary for Joseph to participate in this great game, this divine game with human beings, that he should be a just man, a man who loved the will of God, and one who always tried to put it into practice, no matter what that meant. The sky's the limit.

The actions of Joseph seemed to echo the words of Mary and the actions of Mary, “Be it done to me according to your Word” (Luke 1:38), in all the specific moments that are called or placed before us.

There was a Spaniard who came to Ireland in the early 1950s, Arnold Torrens. His degree wasn't recognized in the country as an engineering degree. He got a job making coffee in the engineering office. Eventually, he got his degree recognized after a lot of toil.

They gave him some drawings to work on in the office. Little by little he worked himself up to be the boss and to own the company. He built it up to be the most prestigious electrical and engineering company in the country.

I remember, in the talk, him saying that he had a tough board meeting that lasted from nine in the morning till five in the evening. He was being put on the spot all the time. He said when he came out from that day of work and that meeting, he felt totally exhausted, and it came to mind that what our Father said was ‘each day had to be a Mass.’

He said, I really felt this day in my life: this professional working day has been a Mass. It was rather interesting to hear those words.

St. Joseph teaches us to work like that, to put everything into what we're doing, to make each day a day of intensity, each day a Mass. We imitate St. Joseph by sanctifying our professional work, whatever work it is that God has placed in front of us.

St. Benedict said, “External monotony is an invitation to inner change, whereas novelty and constant variety short-circuit the process of going deeper.” The humdrum realities of each day are an invitation to inner change.

Pope Francis in his document on St. Joseph says the person who works, whatever his task, collaborates with God Himself, and becomes a little bit the creator of the world around us (cf. Pope Francis, Apostolic Letter, Patris Corde, Point 6).

In the fulfillment of our ordinary professional duties, the ordinary humdrum ones, we come to change the world around us. “Let every man remain in the calling in which he is called,” we're told (1 Cor. 7:20).

All the little duties of our work, of our family, all the little things that God has placed around us, this is where God wants us to function. The sanctification of work, we know, is at the heart of the spirit of Opus Dei. It's a means to reach God.

The largest part of Our Lord's life was fulfilled in Nazareth in those ordinary circumstances. “You should be full of wonder,” said our Father in The Forge, “at the goodness of Our Father God. Are you not filled with joy to know that your home, your family, your country, which you love so much, all these are the raw material which you must sanctify?”

“Don't be afraid of loving others,” he says, “for His sake, and don't worry about loving your own people even more, provided, no matter how much you love them, you love Him a million times more” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Forge, Points 689, 693).

We can ask Our Lady in these days and hours, as we prepare for the Feast of St. Joseph, that she might help us to be a little closer to the Holy Patriarch.

Our Lady and Our Lord must be very happy when they see us bringing out of the background, in our interior life, the loving father and husband that they had, and placing him in the forefront. They must be particularly happy when they see us giving a lot of importance to St. Joseph.

Mary, may you help us to pay a little bit more attention to this great saint that you've placed before our eyes.

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.

MML