Retreat: St. Joseph

This weekend I was on a retreat that focused on St. Joseph.

My Carmelite community does a weekend retreat each year. This year actually less than half were able to participate in this one, and it was not exclusively a Carmelite retreat, but as Carmelites we follow our Holy Mother's special devotion to St. Joseph, so it's all good.

This is how I see Joseph. Not an old, dried up geezer, but a handsome, manly man.
The Church Fathers tend to agree with me.

Do you know the feeling when you go to work or are doing your responsibilities, but all you really want inside is to sit at the beach, or curl up in a blanket and sleep? Well, I can be a bit of the opposite. Sometimes, I really want to be intense and I long to burn tons of energy, but instead I am called by God to rest and be at peace. That was this retreat. No matter from which direction we come, God calls us to live by His energy and unto His will. And in this season in my life, I am learning to love and be loved, to receive, to rest, to share and not manage, to stop the interior drumming of demand and to sing the interior song of gratitude, praise, wonder, love. To burn energy not like a car with the accelerator stuck, but to behold the immensity of His fiery love, bring all the aching needs of the world there, but most of all to know the peace and rest that He is in the core of that.

St. Joseph and I don't really have an extensive relationship (though that might change, now). But back in 2009, he did sort of drop something down deep into my soul, which I wrote about here. It struck me then that love, exemplified in the fiery and virginal love of Joseph and Mary, is a death, a complete, sacrificial, handing over of oneself, a crucifixion -- which also lasts but a time before the glory of the resurrection is revealed.

A love which is completely human, yet completely transformed by self-gift to God in holiness seems to challenge our thinking (in which we generally tend to hold up ourselves as the highest standard of holiness we can imagine -- God help us). Did Joseph have to be an old man in order to not have sexual relations with Mary? Did God design a creepy family, like the child brides we all recoil from seeing in modern news (14 year old girl, 70 year old man?!) Or does God work with real human beings, real lives, real love, and real sanctity? Yes, that's it.

When people saw Peter and John after Pentecost, what was noted as striking about them? That they had been with Jesus. Well, Joseph and Mary are the hidden ones who not only had been with Jesus, but were given the vocation and the accompanying gifts to raise Him as parents. Was that a holy setting? Oh, you bet. Was it flashy, attention-getting, the hot news in Nazareth? Apparently not. When Jesus started His publicly ministry, his neighbors made "Who is this guy?" complaints. The most holiness ever in one domicile, and apparently it was all wasted on normal life. Huh.

Joseph's tables didn't survive. Cloth that Mary wove or the meals she made went they way of earth. But the virtue they lived endures in them for all eternity, and they share with all the children of the Church, and all who are called to it. So we can ask Joseph and Mary to teach us to be with Jesus in our normal life like they were, and thereby to be sanctified, like they were. They share everything. This is kingdom life. This is cool.

Praying God's Word

Today's Mass readings (found here) bring forth one package to teach us about prayer.

From my childhood, I read the passage from Isaiah 55:10-11 as something akin to magic:

Thus says the LORD:Just as from the heavensthe rain and snow come downAnd do not return theretill they have watered the earth,making it fertile and fruitful,Giving seed to the one who sowsand bread to the one who eats,So shall my word bethat goes forth from my mouth;It shall not return to me void,but shall do my will,achieving the end for which I sent it.

It seemed to me that all that was needed was to quote Scripture, and something powerful would happen. Or, all I had to do was read Scripture, and God would take care of every concern in the world. At one point, I felt this freed me from disconcerting notions like living according to Scripture, and at others, I felt this would give me instant gratification of all my desires, spiritualized though I may have made them.

But today it strikes me clearly that the word that goes forth from the mouth of God is not simply any random verse of Scripture that we pick out for ourselves. The word God sends, reminiscent of course of the Incarnation, the Word who does God's will, is the word which is born of the Holy Spirit in the open field of the heart of the believer, the child of Mary. It is the living and active word which God speaks into the prophet, which will work in that heart because it is God's work, and which will grow and develop of its own accord, because this is the fecund nature of the heart God recreates and enters by grace (Phil. 2:13).

The path to prepare this heart for the Lord is addressed in the psalm: God delivers the just from their distress. He hears the cry of the afflicted. He saves and is close to the crushed. We can know then that distress, afflictions and crushing are part and parcel of the purification of our hearts for God's garden to grow. He will confront every doing of evil within us, and cause remembrance of it to be destroyed out of us. This is a work of his mercy, to be neither feared nor resisted.

And the gospel simply tells us that we are to pray as Jesus instructs us. And he has instructed us. We can fall into two errors here: we can hammer the words of the Lord's Prayer by so much ardent repetition that they become one auditory splat that we don't even recognize with our hearts. We can also resist repeating Jesus' words and judge others as pagans for doing so to the point that we ignore Jesus' teaching to "pray, saying." Any decent instruction in prayer is going to teach us how to pray the Lord's Prayer. But the fact is, we pray by receiving the living and active word. We first need to approach God with silence, with emptiness, by feeling our inadequacy and the impossibility of reaching him by our own means. We pray first with our longing. Then we can pray, saying. As we pray, saying, we receive the living and active word. We stay with it for as long of a growing season God gives: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years.