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I seem to start most reflections with an inspiration drawn from our farm, and this time, it was a mother cow and her young calf that caught my attention.
Watching these two together, you get a real sense of the limits that the mother has to deal with. She can’t pick up her calf or exert any real control over what he does. At three days old, he can already outrun a human (as I can attest to, having had to ear-tag him), and he is much more mobile than his mother.
So she ends up just following him around, and she gets increasingly distressed whenever he goes somewhere she can’t.
This may seem like a strange place to start a meditation on St. Joseph, but there are a surprising number of parallels.
We know very little about Joseph, but what we see of him in the early gospels has that same ring of helplessness to it.
He is asked to guard and protect the two most important people in the history of the world, and to do it in seemingly impossible situations.
Mary’s episode giving birth in a stable can be seen, on some level, as Joseph’s failure to provide for his wife.
Almost immediately after this, they hear prophesies about a sword piercing Mary’s heart. Then they are forced to depart from their own country. In our eyes, this is less than an ideal start for the Holy Family.
Finally, what most likely would have weighed heaviest on Joseph’s heart was the fact that he wasn’t the actual father of this Child he was trying to raise.
Between the rocky early start, Joseph losing the Incarnate Word of God during his childhood for multiple days, and Joseph’s probable early death (as we never hear about him again), in some ways the best thing you could say about his husband/fatherhood is that Jesus and Mary survived it.
It seems strange, then, that this is not the way we ultimately picture Joseph. He wasn’t Jesus’ biological father, and he was clearly in over his head during Jesus’ childhood, but many view him as the greatest saint that wasn’t Immaculately Conceived.
When I first encountered Madonna House, I had a somewhat similar view of the community. They seemed to straddle the line between family and religious life, without really belonging to either.
St Joseph walked a similar line in a lot of ways.
His life in Nazareth (from which Madonna House derives its spirituality of the sanctity of ordinary life) shows how an ordinary man, clearly in over his head, and with no biological children of his own, can be a very real father, spiritually speaking. Jesus’ formation, his growing in grace and wisdom (Lk 2:52) was a reflection of Joseph’s guidance.
St. Joseph is the patron of the men’s department of Madonna House, and every year on the feast of St. Joseph (March 19th), we laymen are celebrated.
Due to the uniqueness of our role, for me there can sometimes be a strange feel to this celebration.
What is our role? We are not priests or monks, but we are living out a consecrated life in a way no less holy. We have no wives or children, but our spiritual family grows every year.
We are tasked with a similar duty to St. Joseph’s: that of providing for and protecting our MH family, knowing full well how impossible this is on a human level.
Thanks be to St. Joseph for showing us the fruitfulness of such a role, even though we live it out in an imperfect manner.
