Feast of the Holy Family
I had seen a post on Facebook that jokingly challenged everyone to memorize every word that St. Joseph said in the Gospels by the time the holy year ends on 8 December 2021. The joke is that St. Joseph, while mentioned numerous times in the Gospel, never has a recorded word spoken in the gospel accounts. This lack of talking may make him, in the view of many wives, the perfect example of a husband: always silent.
What can we learn from a man who never had a word that he said recorded? There is much we can learn from this saint, and I’ll highlight one in particular.
St. Joseph was a man who had a deep relationship with God. Before even Jesus was born, Joseph was attune to God speaking to him in dreams. Joseph took Jesus and Mary to the temple 40 days after the birth of Jesus in accord with the Law of Moses. And the Holy Family traveled to the temple for the pilgrim festivals of the Jewish faith, like Passover and the Feast of Booths. While we have no direct evidence, Jesus seemed very familiar with the synagogue and how the services were conducted, so Joseph must have taken Jesus to synagogue throughout Jesus’ life.
Fathers: in many ways, we fathers have lived up to our call to help our families have a relationship with God. This is certainly true of certain spiritual fathers, priests who preyed on the vulnerable and led them away from God. But it’s also true of biological fathers. How many children consider religion to be a things that mostly girls do? How many times is it the mother who is making sure that the kids go to Mass, while the father makes excuses about golf, watching sports or sleeping in?
I encourage you, fathers, to make sure that your families (including you!) are going to Mass every Sunday and Holyday, except in case of illness (or a pandemic). Why don’t kids practice the faith after they leave the house? Because, in so many cases, the faith clearly wasn’t that important when they were living at home. It certainly isn’t the only part of being Catholic and developing a relationship with Jesus, but it’s an important part. Most people who attend Mass will tell me that they never had a choice when they were growing up about attending Mass; it was non-negotiable, even on vacation. I dare say that most people, at some point in their lives, do not want to go to church. But that habit of going is so important. Because when life gets rough, as it always does, without faith, it’s so much harder to get through and to know where to turn, than it is with a practice of going to Mass.
Another part of our faith is daily prayer. The Mass is necessary for our relationship with God, but so is daily prayer. Sometimes that prayer can be formal prayers that we learned, like the Our Father, Hail Mary, and/or Glory Be. Maybe during this year of St. Joseph we can learn the Memorare of St. Joseph. But prayer isn’t always formal. Yes, in the Mass, we use special, elevated language to communicate with God. But in our daily prayer we are encouraged to use everyday language to share with the Lord our hopes and fears, our desires, our struggles, our needs, and everything that is a part of our life. If you can talk with a friend, you can talk with God. And, like with our friends, we also need to learn how to listen, so that we can hear God’s voice. Fathers: teach your children (or grandchildren) to pray. Teach them to be able to speak to Jesus and to listen to Jesus.
There are so many other ways that St. Joseph is a great model for all Catholics, especially, but not only, for men. He is a great intercessor for chastity, for work, for the importance of fathers in a family, as well as the patron of a happy death, which is not something to be neurotic about, but something for which we should always be prepared by living the best life that we can, centered around God. I’ll close today with a prayer to St. Joseph, which closed the Apostolic Letter, Patris corde, with which Pope Francis inaugurated the Holy Year of St. Joseph:
Hail, Guardian of the Redeemer,
Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
To you God entrusted his only Son;
in you Mary placed her trust;
with you Christ became man.
Blessed Joseph, to us too,
show yourself a father
and guide us in the path of life.
Obtain for us grace, mercy and courage,
and defend us from every evil. Amen.
