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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

St Joseph’s Trials – and Joys

St Joseph’s Trials – and Joys

While I am writing this, two voices speak to me from the radio in the next room. The first tells me that I must at all costs buy some crystalline nail varnish. Without this magical preparation I will be vulnerable to all the real and imaginary demons that haunt the modern desert. In particular I will find nobody to love me.

The other voice, that of a woman of forty imitating the intonation of a child of eight, begins to sing – ‘I want you; I want you; I want you to be my page 669 baby . . .’. A Martian visitor might be forgiven for assuming that this woman is expressing a wish to conceive a child. He would be a long way wide of the mark.

The woman in question has, in all probability, several times expressed her desperate wish not to conceive by aborting and thus killing her own unborn children; and in her private life she is a devotee of the Pill. Again privately, she is getting on fairly well with her third husband when he happens to be home. But she is expressing publicly, for a large financial return, the common wish of many millions of women between the ages of fifteen and fifty to grasp, hold and keep a man – whether married already to someone else, unmarried or divorced, will make little difference – whom they can regard as their exclusive physical and emotional property. And in this relationship, if they should happen to establish it, God will hardly have a look in. It will be a cosy claustrophobic Me and You; and God can go and peddle His wares somewhere else.

These observations are not as remote as they may seem from the main theme of my meditation – the faith and humility of St Joseph – for that great and humble Father of the Church had to deal with an opposite kind of relationship, one where God indicated that He had prior and extraordinary claims on St Joseph’s fiancée (later his wife) and where even natural fatherhood was taken from him to be replaced by the unique function of being Foster-Father to God Himself.

I think it can be argued that the Holy Child was illegitimate; not in the blasphemous sense argued by certain Jewish commentators, but in the sense that neither human society nor human law had provided for the unique happening of the Incarnation. And St Joseph thought at first that his fiancée had conceived a child by another man.

It must have bewildered him. He must have been aware of her unusual purity and holiness. Perhaps he thought that what sometimes happens to very unworldly girls had happened to her – that some man had taken advantage of her innocence and led her into material rather than formal sin, with the disastrous consequence of the loss of virginity and the conception of a child. We may safely assume that his ignorance remained wholly charitable.

He grieved for her and himself and the unborn child and decided to hush the matter up, terminating the betrothal and leaving her family to deal with the matter. He may even have had it in mind to make private arrangements for the child’s adoption into another family. At any rate he decided not to go ahead with the arrangements for his marriage. And apparently Our Lady did not enlighten him at all. She must have known that this was to be a trial sent by God for him; and since she loved him, she must have grieved for him.

In the clear afterlight of Christian knowledge the situation may seem rather grotesque to us. But what it reveals most is that God does not necessarily communicate His purposes at once to those whom He is using page 670 as His instruments. He let Joseph make a deeply absurd mistake. He let him grope his way in sorrow and darkness. And then He told him what the true situation was.

Joseph must then have been both grateful and awe-struck. Something quite unprecedented was expected of him. Perhaps the moment when he accepted the Lord’s will in this regard was the moment when he ceased to be a good Jewish carpenter and became a great Christian saint.

St Joseph showed his possession of the virtue of faith in an heroic degree by his acceptance of the function of Foster-Father to the Holy Child. He showed an equally heroic humility by his acceptance of his status within that Family.

In the Divine order Our Lord in His Humanity stands and stood above all other created beings. Our Lady is and was second to Him. But St Joseph, however saintly, cannot be regarded as the spiritual equal of either of them. He would have to be the lowly one. It requires a perfect humility for a man to live in intimacy with those who are in a vast degree his spiritual superiors. In Joseph’s unique case the situation was further complicated by the fact that in the hierarchy of the Holy Family he was undeniably the Head.

This carries an implicit message for our era when the hierarchy of the family is everywhere being weakened and overturned. Wives may correctly assume that they are both holier and more intelligent than their husbands. Adolescent children may also assume – and not necessarily without reason – that they know what is good for them better than their parents do. But the example of the Holy Family teaches us that God wishes the natural hierarchy to be maintained, whatever disparity there may be in intellectual and spiritual gifts. Mary obeyed Joseph, and Jesus obeyed His Mother and His Foster-Father. It is a holy paradox.

And if it took great humility for Joseph to live in unity with his Superiors, it must have taken far greater humility for him to exercise his God-given authority over them. To distinguish between one’s personal merits and one’s social or family function is hard for us at the best of times. St Joseph extends an encouraging hand to those men – perhaps plagued by various weaknesses and the painful knowledge that their wives and even their children know more and act better than they do – who have nevertheless the task of exercising a strong and benign authority in a Catholic household. He tells them by his example that they must not allow themselves to be persuaded or browbeaten into a secondary place. He tells them that God’s help is real and will be forthcoming.

It would be a mistake for us to see Joseph solely as a servant to Our Lady and Our Lord. At Our Lord’s birth he provided the minimum necessities of the physical environment, but he also provided the necessary spiritual dimension of human fatherhood into which Our Lord was born. Later he must have led the prayers in that extraordinary Household.

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And in relation to Our Lady I do not think we should assume that he behaved precisely as the humble courtier of the Queen of Heaven. We know that their marital relation was suitably and wholly celibate. Yet what joy these two lovers and spouses must have had in each other’s company. It would be a foretaste on earth of what we lesser creatures will know only in Heaven when a word or a look or a touch of the hand will mean infinitely more than the most passionate embrace could mean here and now.

And can we imagine Our Lady withholding from the man who was prepared to endure all things for her sake any vestige of the obedience and tenderness which wives are able, if they wish, to offer husbands? How carefully she must have tended him as he weakened and grew old!

I do not think we should in anyway consider St Joseph a member of our modern tribe of deprived husbands.

There is also the matter of the dream by which God warned Joseph of the Herodian massacre. God, who established the hierarchy of the Holy Family, made this communication to its Head. St Joseph must have known that many dreams rise from the pressure of daily work or even from disturbed digestive processes. The Jews of that time were not unaware of the existence of the subconscious mind, though they would use a different terminology from that of our modern psychologists. But St Joseph had an advantage over us of living in an age of faith. We would probably brush away a dream that might seem to have come from God. St Joseph would consider its likely validity, and apply certain tests to it: Was it different in quality from other dreams he had had: Were there parallels in the history of his race? Was it accompanied by an infusion of the life of God in his soul?

He would remember perhaps the dream of Jacob and the dream of Solomon at the time when he mounted the throne of Israel. And then, granting to himself that he could conceivably be mistaken, but recognising that all acts done by God come partly direct from God and partly from the souls of God’s instruments, he would discuss the dream seriously with Our Lady. And her respectful assent would help him to come to a decision.

Nowadays, if any husband had a dream which he thought might have been sent him by God, it is likely that his wife would shake her head and suggest either a holiday or a visit to a psychiatrist. But one has to remember that Mary and Joseph were not simply united to one another; they were each united through the other to God, and their common life was lived in the light of God’s mercy and the expectation of God’s will.

Perhaps if it were so with us the springs of the heart would not so easily dry up and our society would have a less barren and demonic aspect.

Joseph acted on his dream – not perhaps because he knew with total certainty that it had come from God, but because his heroic faith weighed the possibilities and thought it very likely that Herod was angry and that God wished him to take the Family to Egypt where, as a stranger, he might live page 672 in poverty and suffer unemployment. He did not make an idol of material security.

And it may be that what St Joseph can tell us most clearly is that after faith and humility a spirit of poverty is the most important essential to keep our souls open to the breath of the Divine Love.

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