Dear Joseph – Look after them

It has sometimes bothered me a little that – though Saint Joseph is my patron saint – I can think of no obvious intervention in my life, where I can say – ‘Ah, that was the hand of Joseph!’ I choose him as a patron when I came into the Church as an adult convert; and chose him deliberately because I am a married man with a family.

But I cannot honestly say that since then there have been any spectacular conversions – my parents were received into the Church, but hardly in any obvious way by Joseph’s intervention – or any unusual recoveries from sickness, or any great material or spiritual windfalls, or any family difficulties miraculously solved. This is no doubt as it should be. Personally I regard Joseph as the saint of ‘small men’, the saint of the status quo; and marriages are maintained on the whole by unspectacular maintenance work. So the very page 528 absence of major upheavals may be a sign of his protection.

Sometimes, when I am running for a bus, I will say, rather absurdly – ‘Joseph, please hold it for a moment.’ Or when some engagement has taken me away from my family for a week-end, I will first visit the statue of Joseph in the cathedral, and light a candle in front of it, and say – ‘Dear Joseph, look after them, keep them safe, and do the things for them that I won’t be able to do.’ Again, there is a touch of absurdity in the arrangement, as if I were thinking of Joseph as my personal substitute. I (trust that the great saint smiles about it.

Yet there are several permanent attitudes of my own which I connect with his patronage. Quite often, looking around among my friends and acquaintances, many of whom are non-Catholics but none the less dear to me on that account, it seems to me that every second marriage I know is breaking up. I know the causes – muddled thinking, moral isolation, the curious modern reversal of the roles of men and woman, and the endless strain that our de-personalised, de-sacralised society imposes on its members. These factors are more or less irreversible. One can’t push the clock back; one can’t even push it forward.

Here I am stuck bang at the centre of the Atom Age, the Age of Anxiety, subject to all the strains that it engenders; yet my own marriage is not actually on the rocks – not for this twenty-four hours anyway. And I look at my friends, and see that neither love nor goodwill nor intelligence nor (sometimes) faith has been enough to save them; and a sense of awe descends on me, a sense that I am indeed protected, since I do not have a quarter of their moral and psychological assets. Nor is it the undoubted goodness of my wife – not herself a Catholic or even a practising deist – that holds things together; for the mark of our times is that even very good people lose heart. No; I am inclined to think that the imperceptible influence of Joseph has something to do with it.

Certainly for me the thought of him is a nodal point, a compass bearing; it gives me objectivity, and helps me to understand at least that God has a plan for me and my family, even if the meaning of that plan is usually beyond my intellectual grasp. I tend to identify myself with Joseph – to say inwardly – ‘Yes; this is my job; this is my place. What happens is not my business. My business is to accept it as God’s will, and try to make good use of it, as a farmer ploughs and sows a field.’ And the element of personal suffering, though still present, becomes relatively unimportant. This quietness at the heart of conflict is certainly not my own invention; it lies within the control of Joseph, patron of families.

We have tended perhaps to European-ise Joseph too much. Those angelic statues with the pallid face and the pointed beard are an artistic compromise. I find it helpful to remember that Joseph was and is a Jew. Let us try to see him for a moment mentally as he was – a strong-minded, strong-faced, page 529 practical Jew, wearing the Jewish phylacteries, leading the Holy Family in the traditional Hebrew prayers, working as a carpenter under conditions that we could very likely consider too primitive for words, talking to others with that inimitable salt of Jewish humour which still belongs to his race today.

From whom did Our Lord get the habit of thinking and conversing in anecdotes? If we say that He had no human influence, but became the kind of man He was by a merely self-engendered growth, we may come near to falling into the trap of Arianism; and certainly we will not be doing justice to the part that God allows human beings to play in the Divine economy.

We commonly think of Him sitting as a Child on His Mother’s knee, while she told Him stories or taught Him the Jewish alphabet; yet Jewish society was patriarchal; and it is more than possible that it was often Joseph’s knee he sat on, Joseph’s voice that He heard, and the actions of Joseph that He imitated. During His ministry He may well have remembered the traditional tales that he had heard as a Boy from the lips of Joseph, and built them into His own parables. It is worth remembering that while it is our business continually to honour God, it is also part of the meaning of the Incarnation that God wished to honour man. An ingredient in the development of Our Lord’s superb and masculine intellect may well have been the abiding influence of Saint Joseph.

One of the reasons why we tend to see Joseph as a somewhat neutral figure – in my opinion, unjustly – is because we do not take to heart his deep Jewishness. It is by thinking frequently of Joseph – a Jewish artisan, frequenting the synagogue, obedient to the customs of his race, saturated in its traditions – that I have become in a sense pro-Semitic. I remember saying to an old refugee friend of mine, who carried with him the deep wound of the European persecutions – ‘To me you are always Joseph’ – and how he smiled and accepted the comment as if it pleased him.

The hideous perversion of anti-Semitism, by which the Devil tries to insult the manhood of Our Lord and the womanhood of Our Lady, should yield quickly to the influence of Joseph. The race to which a man belongs provides certainly only one element of his personality; yet it is an inclusive element, an atmosphere that gives particular nuances to his thoughts and feelings; and to understand Joseph – since we long to understand those we love – it helps me a great deal to remember that he was and is a Jew. The image I have of Joseph is no longer a pallid one.

I see also in Joseph the perfect balance of the masculine and feminine elements which go together to make up a true man – the tenderness, the listening, the waiting, the desire to heal wounds, which is the female side of sanctity, presenting good men, with no trace whatever of effeminacy; the masculine fortitude and controlled energy and decision-making power. These, I think, combine in Joseph; and I am helped to accept my own ‘feminine’ side, which our society tends to downgrade in favour of the false masculinity page 530 of the boaster and the lout.

Joseph is above all the father of the Church – it was as such, I think, that Pope John included him in the Canon of the Mass – and this implies a spiritual paternity which is continually fruitful and which includes elements which we would commonly consider maternal. The good shepherd is both father and mother to his flock. My central prayer to Saint Joseph would run something like this, though it is for me normally an unspoken prayer:

Dear Joseph, there are wounds everywhere in the world around us. Give me that combination of paternal and maternal love which continually desires to shield and protect others, which is able to heal wounds and bring light in place of darkness and joy in place of fear. Make me a true man. Make me a man like yourself. Replace my desire for comfort with a desire to comfort others. Make me unconcerned about my own salvation and concerned instead that the will of God should be known and done. But never let my religion become abstract and geometrical. Dear Joseph, make me entirely human; and plant the Divine Child at the centre of my life. Amen.

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