Category: the saints

St. Joseph, give me your silence

St. Joseph is a quiet saint. For my first several years as a Catholic, his March 19 feast day passed by without my acknowledgment. This wasn’t fair or just on my part because he’d definitely been around in my life. But, like Mary, his brief appearance in Scripture and near-silence left more to the imagination than I was ready to spend on him. Other male saints—like St. John the Apostle, St. Thomas More, St. Isaac Jogues—captured my attention with their accolades and heroism. St. Joseph was just too quiet to notice.

Yet, like Mary, Joseph’s silence in Scripture, coupled with His faithful obedience to God, offer rich food for meditation. As I grow more deeply in my own vocation—where I will not live a life of big heroics like John, Thomas, or Isaac, love them as I do—my attention has turned more and more towards the Holy Family to find the heart of this interior life that spends itself physically in the home, mostly unseen.

Of St. Joseph’s silence, Pope Benedict XVI wrote it is “a silence woven of constant prayer, a prayer of blessing of the Lord, of the adoration of his holy will and of unreserved entrustment to his providence.” In one homily I heard years ago at a local parish, the priest pointed out that Joseph was so prayerful, he could listen to God in his sleep. Pope Benedict XVI also wrote, “Let us allow ourselves to be ‘filled’ with St Joseph’s silence! In a world that is often too noisy, that encourages neither recollection nor listening to God’s voice, we are in such deep need of it.”

It’s so difficult to find actual, physical silence anywhere, particularly in a home. When I had my first baby, there was so much silence that it made me uncomfortable. Whenever she was asleep, I enjoyed the first several minutes of quiet, but wasn’t sure what to do with myself after that; I was so unaccustomed to silence that it made me agitated. Now, with so much to do and so much activity in the house, I would know exactly what to do with that hour of silence.

But there is a silence of the heart that I am praying for the grace to develop, that stillness spoken of in the psalms, the stillness that Jesus asked of the disciples on the stormy sea. Ideally, one would start the day with prayer or Mass, and I used to have such high expectations—a Rosary! Liturgy of the Hours! Wake-up at 4:00 and pray on my knees! Yeah, that never happened. I have settled for a brief morning offering. It orients my heart and mind towards God in a simple, straightforward moment. Evening prayer has gone the same way: I’ve settled for a brief examination, a brief list of gratitude—and honestly, sometimes it’s just a “Glory Be” beside my bed before collapsing. 

It’s the middle of the day that needs so much work. When life doesn’t happen the way I want it to, even simple daily tasks, I get agitated and that stillness is disrupted: if I don’t eat breakfast soon enough, if I have to clean up spilt milky cereal, if my little ones won’t occupy themselves long enough for me to help another child with division, if my toddler is screaming for food while I’m making dinner… the list is generous. If I fail to pray throughout the day—and these are little prayers, little cries and thank-you’s to God—then I grow more and more disgruntled and agitated, and instead of silence, I have a litany of complaints turning over in my head.

The Holy Family couldn’t have been without those daily annoyances. As a carpenter, Joseph must have dealt with the messy business of getting paid, jobs taking longer than anticipated, dissatisfied customers. And like every family, I’m sure they dealt with not having enough food on the table, illness, the circulating village gossip. But they weren’t somber puritans either—they were friendly, generous neighbors who partook in the feasts and festivals of the year. I’m certain they danced. Yet, in all this, they maintained peace and a still readiness before God. I hunger and pray for that.

flight into Egypt

I never gave much thought to the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. It was like an interlude in the greater story. The horror of Herod ordering the mass murder of baby boys drew all my attention. But in Maria von Trapp’s memoir Yesterday, Today, and Forever, she writes about when the Flight into Egypt began to resonate with her: as she and her family were fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria, one of her daughters needed comforting, so Maria had one of those parenting moments that I think we’ve all had—she opened her mouth to speak, and wasn’t sure what was about to come out of it. She proceeded to tell her daughter the story of another Family who had to flee for the safety and preservation of their lives. This Family, like the Von Trapps, only knew where they were going,  but did not how they would survive or what dangers and surprises might be waiting for them along the way. For Maria von Trapp, it led her down years of research and pondering about details of the Holy Family’s life.

Since reading that book, I have caught glimpses of this mystery in scattered readings, prayers, and sermons; the most memorable are from the Seven Sorrows and Joys of St. Joseph and Caryll Houselander’s Reed of God.

The flight into Egypt is the 5th Sorrow and Joy of St. Joseph. Meditations on this obviously differ from person to person, but Joseph’s primary sorrow would be having to leave Judea, and with that all his hopes and expectations of family life with Mary and Jesus. As a carpenter, he would have probably fashioned a cradle back in Nazareth, or maybe little toys, for the anticipated baby. And if you’ve ever traveled somewhere foreign that is especially hostile to your faith, there would of course be sorrow in the concern for safety. But what about Joseph’s joy? I imagine incredible things must have happened when God Himself strode into a land where pagan gods reigned. I imagine they would have scattered, though we don’t know for sure what happened. But, like all saints, Joseph must have marveled and rejoiced at the way God led them through the wilderness and miraculously provided. (Coptic Christians have a lot of wonderful traditions surrounding the Flight into Egypt, if you are interested in learning more.)

The irony—or rather, providence—could not have escaped Joseph, a man of God who knew Scripture, that he was leading his dear ones to safety into pagan Egypt, just as another Joseph, who God also spoke to through dreams, had done hundreds of years before.

In Reed of God, English mystic Houselander speculates that perhaps the Gifts of the Magi were used by Joseph to sell and purchase tools in order to earn a living while in Egypt (though according to some, Mary kept the myrrh for Jesus’ burial). Houselander, in her brilliant way of relating the Gospel to the everyday, also writes:

Everywhere the flight into Egypt goes on: the little home is forsaken, the child in peril, the innocents slain; everywhere the refugees—Jesus, Mary, Joseph—come to us: strangers, foreigners in a strange land from every country… For them all, Our Lady has answered, long ago: “Be it done unto me.”

From the Flight to Egypt, this call to mercy for refugees and the stranger is unmistakable, and one of those things that haunts me. It’s something I don’t pray enough about, and don’t do much about. It makes me uncomfortable in the best sense– something I know I need to listen to and act on.

Yet there is one aspect of the Flight that I can relate to: being told to “go” and “do” without a lot of details. Anyone who has ever been told, led in prayer, or forced to set out on a journey has faced the unknown. My husband often says that following God is like walking through a fog— backwards. We all have the opportunity to make our Flight into Egypt: to listen, pick up our mats, and walk. And without asking a lot of why’s and how’s. To carry only the unanticipated gifts God has given us, and to trust that He has given us just what we need.