Saint Joseph’s soul was a soul as ordinary in this world as mine.
I completed a consecration to Saint Joseph, Foster Father of Christ, and have not been able to see that Great Saint in the same way ever since.
And that is a marvellous thing.
You see, we rarely hear about Saint Joseph in the Bible. After all, apart from his initial involvement with the marriage to the Blessed Virgin, and a few dreams which allowed him to move the Holy Family from one place to another – effectively protecting the God-Child, when He was too young to protect Himself – we do not hear anything at all about Saint Joseph. And I suppose a part of me assumed that since we were not hearing much about this Saint that somehow it meant that he was not so important to us. And yet – he is terribly, terribly important – not only to the Holy Family and God Himself, but also to me as my adopted Foster Father. After all, if Saint Joseph is good enough to be the Father of God, then he is surely good enough to father me…
Saint Joseph is a protector. He protected the Blessed Virgin when she had conceived God in her womb. And he did this initially by staying silent, when he would have been shocked at the situation and had every right to cry out at the strangeness of his situation. And instead, he did not talk to his mother or his father. He did not speak to his brothers or his friends. He did not mention it to his neighbours, or even the priest. Instead, he kept silence in his own heart and – to protect the reputation of the Blessed Virgin – he considered these things between him and God and went to sleep. And when he slept and God spoke to him through an angel in a dream, he did not ignore that message, he listened to it. He considered it. And he changed the course of his entire life based on that message by that angel in that dream. And he repeated that again and again. He did not wake up and shake it off and excuse himself or reason his way out of it. He remembered the dreams and acted on them.
But the really marvellous thing about Saint Joseph, is that he is so ordinary. He was not exceptionally smart or exceptionally funny or exceptionally rich or exceptionally handsome. He was exceptionally ordinary. He had no visions of God – only dreams of angels. He worked for a living – sweating and bargaining in his little village as he made doors and repaired chairs and tables. And in all ordinariness, Saint Joseph demonstrates something magnificent. For his was a soul as ordinary in this world as mine. And inside all of that – Saint Joseph’s soul contained such a depth of faith that he was fit to father the Son of Man.
And today – when I compare the ordinariness of Saint Joseph with my own ordinariness, I am completely dumbstruck. For my own ordinariness has a very long way to go to achieve the heights of holiness of the Foster Father of God!
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.