Reflections on the year of St. Joseph.
There’s a popular phrase in the milieu of identity politics and social diversity engineering : “You can’t be what you can’t see”. Hence the emphasis on hiring and promoting people of a certain identity, class or background so as to encourage others in that group with the perception that such an ascent is possible. Maybe it could really be said that “you cannot love who you cannot see”. In his apostolic letter, Patris Corde, Pope Francis writes of St. Joseph that “[He] was the earthly shadow of the Heavenly Father”. Buried in that short, but deep phrase is a summary of a certain aspect of medieval theology that we can speak of God with analogical rather than univocal predication. On my return voyage to the Catholic Faith of my youth, I remember meeting a student at a congregational community who had more doubts that I had. He was concerned that the idea of God as father was something of an anthropological projection. I remember countering with the understanding, made popular by philosophers like Peter Kreeft, that, far from being a metaphor, the fatherhood of God, is the true, actual and real fatherhood of which earthly fatherhood is the mere metaphor.
Mary Eberstadt has written in the How the West Really Lost God that the collapse of faith in God in the West can be predominantly traced to the collapse in the family, particularly the role of the father. Given the strongly relational aspects of Catholic Theology, this makes sense, especially given that children and adults alike learn from others by example. Books, learning and knowledge, as important as those things are, are more like means rather than ends. We are not meant to be atomised individuals who only develop through unmediated book knowledge. As much it helps, knowledge doesn’t save us. Nevertheless, in our era of data overload and informational inter-connectedness, this may be only catechetical development for a person from areligious household in society whose institutions are more alienated from Christian thought or imprint, unmoored on a turbulent sea fo completing, conflicting and at times self-contradictory ideas. The primary reason many don’t know or don’t love God the father could be that they don’t know or love or aren’t loved by their earthly father. How many lose faith in Our Heavenly Father because they have no father around, or have an over-bearing, controlling father, or an ineffective aloof, feckless dad ?
The depiction of a what a father is ideally supposed to look like is often lost in a sea of caricatures of the modern ‘dad’, in the oafish, irresponsibility of Homer Simpson, in the ineffective, over-ruled, undermined, disobeyed dead beats of the beat generation and its breakdown of roles, and with it the distinctive responsibilities. A father, in the fullest sense, is a life-giver. From a biological perspective, a father initiates the very beginnings of life. That St. Jospeh is a foster father, the greatest male saint and is not a father to Jesus in the biologically natural sense, allows natural fathers to contemplate the essence of doing fatherly things in St. Joseph – fatherhood in practice, in lived every-days realities. Being a procreator, reflecting God the father can go to our head. The role of father is established gradually over time, as children grow and depends to some extent on society valuing fatherhood. The appreciation of the value of motherhood is less precarious ; a mother is the mother because she gives birth. There is more to motherhood than birth, of course, but the connection between a mother and her children always seems more apparent and tangible. A father’s identity is more hidden, and for those reasons more seemingly dispensable. Once a society no longer enforces the value of fatherhood, the selfish proclivities of fallen man conspire with it in absenting themselves all too often from the lives of their children. According to the BBC in 2013, as many as 1 million children in the United Kingdom were growing without a father in their lives. With the collapse of distinct sex-roles in marriage, an unfortunate conflict has emerge between career and children. The more beholden a woman is to her career, the less likely to have time for a child. The more beholden a man is to his career and the more money he earns, the more free his wife is to have a child and to give that child siblings. It could be said that, in the modern vision of marriage, the distinct value of both man and woman is undermined, but the fact that married women often work outside the home, a young man may wonder what he is supposed to be distinctly bringing to the table. Doing and achieving out in the world-at-large is strongly associated with the identity and dignity of a man.
St. Jospeh is venerated as a protector. This is a fatherly role that can take its shape as it did in the New Testament with the carrying out of angel’s instruction to bring the Holy Family to Egypt in the darkness of King Herod’s reign of terror against the male infants under two years of age. Caesar, as it were, was demanding something that doesn’t belong to him. Apart from very closely analogous experiences of the urgency of such a directive in war-torn parts of the world, for many families, the need to move a family away from danger is an impulse more naturally felt by the husband. Drawing on my own experience as a father of a young family, I moved my family out of Massachusetts in the United States of America – ground zero for the permissive culture of contraception, divorce, homosexuality and abortion. The law of the land as regards the family and religious freedom is diverging more and more from the law of God, and it encroaches more and more onto the self-government of the family. The public square is becoming more and more hostile to religious conscience. We fled a school system which was becoming inimical to the values we hold dear. We moved from Massachusetts to Ireland, to be closer to family and a better school system. To our dismay, we found a similar culture taking root, or more appropriately – taking rot – on the other side of the pond. In the end, there’s only so much running you can do. Evil has to be confronted eventually. Mordor eventually comes to the Shires. However good a school system one can find, it is ultimately the job of parents is to cultivate the best environment where they are fore-armed with faith, can grow in the virtues, and be inoculated against the infections of the age.
St. Joseph is the patron of the worker, the tradesman. One of the benefits of working remotely these post-pandemic days, is the silver lining is having my son or daughter looking in at what I’m doing for professional work (I used to work in academic research but changed to software to provide for my families needs at the time). Instead of attending to the work of St. Joseph as the turning lathe, it’s my son on my knee look at comparatively boring computer programs. I wouldn’t say I work with my hands. But I do work with my fingers . Proper manual labor would seem more satisfying as it involves more of the whole body. But one of the benefits of our era computing is having more physical energy at the end of the 9-5 day – energy to spend more time with children. Handing off a trade has been seen in the past as a core aspect of the relationship of a father to the family Just think of the common English patronymics such as Cooper, Smith or Taylor. Obviously, the trade was seen as intrinsic to the identity. It’s good to set someone up with lucrative skills, not just technical skills but the virtues that come with doing it for love of God and neighbour and doing it well. Growing up, I worked many Summers at my father’s industrial gas company. This is where I learned the meaning and value of work. The work involved servicing and filling metal cylinders. It was simple, but tiring. Of all the jobs I’ve had, there was nothing better for working up a lunch-time hunger. It was a time that involved more than bonding with my dad, although that was a major part of it. It set me up to take life’s difficulties a bit more in stride. To avoid being surprised and embarrassed by my own weaknesses ; to be more sure of myself to be less insecure. We need to be pushed little beyond our comfort zone to become robust. My brothers and I had some minor disasters, including the odd small explosion, but my father was there – so we were safe.
I wonder whether the degree to which trades are looked down upon in some circles so much and academic achievement put on so lofty a pedestal, I wonder whether this has something to do with pride and prestige instead of getting on with just providing for the family which is the important business at hand. I wonder whether we spend too long in school and university when most skills are learnt “on the job anyway”.
Sometimes work is difficult. Sometimes a father shows his fatherhood by pushing his children. Authentic depictions of fathers in film are hard to come by. You usually see extremes. This may explain the popularity of the film Whiplash. This is a film is about a young jazz drummer pushed nearly to self-destruction by an instructor/mentor to improve to be best. Cold, inhumane perfectionism. On the other hand, there is young man’s own father who is more aloof and only as emotionally supportive as an almost close friend, although he does comfort him in failure. True fatherhood is somewhere between, because boys especially need to be pushed. “Set the bar too low, and they go under it. Set the bar too high and they go over it”, so goes the famous phrase in circles of educationalists. It is worth asking whether St. Joseph was technically the best carpenter in the world. I don’t think technical excellence is the only factor of the perfect worker. When John Lennon was asked by an interviewer whether Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world, he replied “Ringo isn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles”. The irony of that statement is that Ringo Starr is today the wealthiest drummer in the world and one of the most highly paid session drummers as well. Many attribute his success in the Beatles to his restraint against over-powering the music, complementing it in a humble manner. With this meekness, he has inherited something that has proven more elusive to his more technically adept percussionists, who are not shy to flaunt their prowess. Ringo was part of something greater than himself and knew it. St. Joseph is silent in the Gospel but his reliability and integrity to take care of the Holy Family speaks to his character.
St. Jospeh is a chaste husband. Chastity is about managing how you give yourself to others and in the life of a husband, this other is his wife. The lily, often depicted in statues of St. Joseph is not so much a light, delicate, flowery symbol but, as in keeping with the paradoxes of our faith, it is really an iron sceptre of self-mastery and self-control, chivalrous. How much friction, tension come into the picture of marriage when the husband is unchaste, when he does not give himself in marital intimacy in such a way that is deferential and chivalrous to his wife ? To impose himself, though emotional manipulation, whining, complaining is damaging to marriage and marital stability. How many divorces are due to that ? With our wounded condition from the the fall of man, many need supernatural help to practise marital countenance when they should. What recourse we have for intercession in St. Joseph who practised that perfect continence in the marriage bond, that manly self-mastery for God. When we need to practise that, we should rely on his intercession. God made St. Joseph – a man, a husband from the same stuff as you and me, to be perfect. St. Joseph’s chastity and his perfection as a husband is a sign to husbands everywhere that sexual gratification is something that cannot be insisted upon in marriage.
Far from anthropomorphising God as Father, and far from being mere analogy or allegory, earthly fatherhood is the shadow or foreshadow of the actual, real fatherhood of God and thereby gets its awesome importance from that. God the Father had his only begotten Son, instructed, guarded, guided in His humanity so as to have an intercessor and model for all fathers in the world. After all of the years of carpentry work, I don’t think the fact that the cross being made of wood is accidental. It harkens back to St. Josephs workshop. Our Lord accomplishes the greatest act of love with those wooden beams – our redemption. Almost incorporating the material of work into the means of salvation. It’s hard to think of some kind of outright and immediate martyrdom involving computer software. But you could imagine something. You need special skills to thwart and subvert evil goings on on the internet – pornography for example. People might come after you and kill you for that. But you need special skills for that and special skills start with ordinary skills. St. Joseph is not there at the foot of the cross, but there is most closely the mystical St. John and Our Lady whom Our Lord deemed we needed more immediately and directly. Our own mothers are always our mothers.
At a certain point, a father’s Earth-based work is done and he must the child free to be the best they are made to be with what they’ve been given. Creation is like that, it’s a separation and a sending of the created on a trajectory, to embrace our final destiny through love, suffering and self gift through the material with which we’re entrusted. St. Joseph may not be there at the foot of the cross, but the cross is made of wood.
Phyos 