"Don't you know St. Joseph is my father now?"

Deep in the recesses of the convent at Nevers, when St. Bernadette still walked alone in the gardens, there stood a tiny chapel dedicated to St. Joseph, foster-father of Our Lord. She spent hours praying there, and would often pray the rosary, the rosary as Our Lady personally taught her near the water in Lourdes- in the convent gardens in front of a statue of St. Joseph.

One day, a sister heard her saying “Ave, Maria…gratia plena…” in her low and quiet voice, while looking up at the bearded face of St. Joseph. “Sister”, the nun exclaimed, “ are you in the wrong place?” Bernadette turned with a wry smile: “ I don’t think Our Lady minds in the least, sister. There is no jealousy in heaven.”

There was a deeper stream of life happening beneath this sweetly humorous remark, which Bernadette, in her reserved manner, did not gurgle about like a talkative village woman. For she was learning to live in Nazareth, in the bosom of the Holy Family. “Did you not know,” she said once, “that now St. Joseph is my father?”

In his book, St. Joseph: Shadow of the Father, Fr. Andrew Doze, Chaplain at Lourdes, elucidates how the life of St. Bernadette- from extreme poverty and illness, to persecuted visionary, to celebrity, to nun, to her holy death and beyond- is a living example of the spiritual life we are all called to live. It is a life within the Holy Family, a life of contemplation with Our Lady, of learning the daily death to self from the quiet hands of St. Joseph, a life centered on adoration of the Christ, the Savior.

St. Bernadette understood in a thousand acute ways what it means to die to self. How did this tabula rasa, this blank slate-soul, learn this lesson that we are all afraid of in the beginning of the spiritual life? We do not know with what grace and knowledge, knowledge of the soul rather than the reason, she was infused. Like St. Joseph, St. Bernadette pales beside the visions and message the Lord wished to give through His Mother. Like St. Joseph, she disappears behind a veil (the convent) when the ministry of Lourdes begins.

Like St. Joseph, the largely silent pattern of her life speaks louder than her words.

So, under the patronage (I pray) of St. Bernadette, let us embark on a journey to know Glorious St. Joseph better.

Pouring Love Down an Empty Well: A Reprint

I first met Terry when I first ‘met the family’ of my husband to be. He came down the stairs, eager to see me, but hiding the eagerness under a veil of sleepiness. He was a big man, and for some reason, I was repulsed by him. He seemed messy; he was informal to the point of it being embarrassing. I made the internal judgement that he was ugly, but that I’d try to like him.

I last saw Terry six days before his death. He was eager to see us, but again hiding it, under a very real veil of morphine. He was messy again; but I was crying, and I didn’t think he was ugly. I wanted to wash his face and comb his hair, but he said he would do it as it would give him something to do. That made me cry more, silent tears of pity and grief- because I couldn’t imagine he could wash or comb anything with his swollen, shaking, gangrened hands. As we prepared to go, he opened his eyes and mouth to whisper, “’Bye sweetie” and I cupped his cheek in my hands and leaned over to kiss him on his rough cheek. I never saw or spoke with him again, because on the next Saturday, without anyone but a nurse, he quietly passed away.

Terry reminded me of The Picture of Dorian Grey for some reason. He’d started out as a handsome, talented youth who made it to the Pros in football; a man who’d married a lovely young bride and fathered three handsome, talented children, taught school and loved it, played golf as much as he wanted, gardened in the large yard of his nice home, and watched TV in his den in the evenings.

But there was an ugliness, hidden under the surface. His marriage was a battlefield, replete with well-placed and coveted mines to hurt the other. His oldest son has a difficult time relating well to his family; his beautiful daughter had almost died from drugs; and he saw his youngest son, my husband, as a moral, bible-beating wet-blanket whom he did not know at all, and whom he mocked. Now, assuredly, not all of this was Terry’s fault; but it was his response to the responsibility of a father which seemed a fault with horrible consequences. It seems to me now that he was a damaged man, a man frightened of being responsible for other people’s lives and happiness. I think he loved them deep inside, and so thought that if he ran away, into activity or inside the TV, that he would do less damage. The wife and children had tried, in various unhealthy ways, to get his love- or at least his real attention. I think Terry survived the fear-producing situation by running from it in a myriad of ingenious ways: games of any kind; a blasting TV even at mealtime; furiously growing every kind of shrub, tree, flower and herb possible (which required many hours outside); and pouring his heart into the students and collegues at his school, instead of actively and toughly loving his family. All of this activity, this running, from the realities of life, gradually took its toll on the look of him. He looked mussed and sweaty, heavy jowled and stressed. There was no peace in the lines furrowing their way to permanence on his face.

In the years that I knew him, I went through the possibilities for the reason for this running, this hidden grotesqueness. Evil? Possessed? Once we tried putting Holy Water in his hamburger. He did jump up right after eating it and charge out of the room. My husband, my mother-in-law and I looked at eachother, and then sheepishly realized that he always did that. Mentally unstable? I walked out into the garden one fall day and found a large circle of plastic decoy ducks, lopey on their runners, like ice skates left to dry. Going inside, I announced very solemnly to my mother-in-law that she could stop being angry and just have pity, because he was crazy and maybe needed care. She laughed kind of forlornly and informed me that he was just creative. I then began to see, just a little bit, the real man inside Terry. He was creative, he was quirky, and had an absurdist sense of humor, which my husband inherited, and which I loved. There was the boot with dirt and flowers peeking out from the tongue at the top; there was the ingenious little golf course in the garden; there was the collection of cool old bar signs, the wacky B movies. . Alright, then. Was he just mean? Or selfish to the point of missing the whole point of life?

At this point in my relationship, if you could call it that, with Terry, I struggled with the temptation to think that it would be better if he were not there, even dead, because there was so much dysfunction and pain, so much anger and hate running in the veins of the family life, that I just wanted it to be over. I now look back with shame on that, because I missed the point as much as he had missed the point. The point is to love. To love where there is no love, to hope where there is darkness, to kiss the repulsive and so to begin, with God’s grace to transform it with love. Only then can you begin to see the truth about a person’s worth, his worth to the God who died a horrifying and grotesque death for him.

I cannot remember now when I began to love, and found the point. Perhaps it was when I realized that he was creative; or the day I looked out and saw him letting the dog kiss his face and just smiling and smiling; or the loneliness I began to see, the anguish at an argument with my husband; or the for-no-reason present of boys’ pajamas we received in the mail (we had two girls at the time), with a small note, “Love, Granddad”.

I began to see someone who had missed the point, the point of loving, partly because he didn’t know how, or was too frightened for some reason. I began to see the complexity of the person, and the complexity of the situation he was in, which can only be seen through love- through charity, a gift of God, and then cannot ever be seen as clearly as God sees. So I began to try and talk, to listen, to call and talk to him just for him, not just in passing. I began to tell him I loved him and to tell him that my husband loved him, too. I began to see I was pouring water down into an empty well. How much time I’d wasted in looking for the reason the well was empty instead of just pouring the much-needed water and leaving the mysterious to God.

As his body began to give out, I realized that he was being shown mercy by being forced to stay with his family, forced to need our care. He was slowly humiliated, and became more and more physically grotesque, reality banging at his door in so many hard ways. But to my eyes, now bettered by love, he became lovelier. He also became nicer, to all of us, and complained really quite little in light of the physical and emotional anguish brought on by a death sentence in a rotting body. I began to hear things he said differently, too. I noticed small details which only someone who loves can see, like the effort he made to thank me for helping them pack for their new home; the pain of leaving his beloved garden; and the child-like need to stay with us, his world now, when he knew deep down that he was dying.

A week before his death, I was driving with two grey friars, Franciscans, to the hospital to see Terry. I was trying to do everything I could for him, because I loved him and wanted mostly for him to have a happy death, in friendship with God. My friend and director, Fr. Sylvester, was one of the grey friars in the car with me. I told him about Terry’s life, and mostly that I felt he had an immense drive, out of fears, to deceive himself about reality. I was afraid for his soul, and wanted him to have a chance for a good confession. Looking very medieval with his hood up around his face, Fr. Sylvester recited the rosary with me, and invoked many saints. I felt we were going into a battle.

Terry was happy to see us, but he was very groggy and in and out of sleep. Fr. Sylvester started talking to him, and Brother Giuseppe and I waited in the hall. When we came back in, I saw Terry’s eyes, they were alight like yellow fires, like a child’s in front of the Christmas tree as it is lit. He reached out his hand to me, in joy, I thought, and great affection. I held his hand and stroked his hair, tufted up like black and grey tumbleweeds. I can’t remember what we said, but I remember Fr. Sylvester giving him a rosary. That rosary stayed on that bed, wrapped around a sidebar, and it must have been there the minute he died, as it now hangs on his wife’s headboard, and she says the rosary with it now. I see that with God-given eyes of love. What wonders you behold, what small beauties which tell a tale which is often so different from what is obvious. When we forget love, we are blind, but we think we see, which is an even deeper blindness.

Also on Terry the instant of death was a brown scapular. It stayed on him, and I pray, it was like a chain of love, drawing him on to God’s love, friendship and mercy, through the gentle hand of Our Lady.

Looking back over the seven or eight years I knew my father-in-law, I only wish I had judged less, listened to other’s talk less about him, and asked God earlier to help me love him. Although I began praying for him from almost the first time I met him, I prayed as an objective observer, or a pitying acquaintance; I should have asked God to help me to love, and started pouring the water of love into his empty well as I was praying. Without love, I venture to say, my prayers were worthless; and I probably played a part in hindering his chance for heaven. So, Terry, your memoriam for me, in my life, is one of conviction: Conviction to love, to pour myself out in love, only with God’s grace, in the dark and the deep, the empty and the ugly. And perhaps I myself will be cleaned and filled through doing it, because I am a deep, dark, empty and ugly well too; only through God, through Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ are we made whole. He deigns to let us assist Him in loving each other, and this is the most important task of our lives, next to loving Him.

May you reach God’s embrace, Theodore James- and may I meet you again there, some fine day.

A Rocking Cradle

There are many issues in the world that are heating up, but a few require prayer.

As always, I am getting my information from news medias, largely the BBC, but also from good websites like Seattle Catholic, who in turn get their information from a wide variety of sources, from Asian sites to Italian, to Australian and American.

The issues I see as ominous are: the strengthening social laws in Europe and the Philipines on religious life; the more frequent and more legal-like demands of militant homosexuals in Europe and the Middle East; and the oil/nuclear crisis blooming in Iran.

These seem like diverse problems, and they are: but they are all potentially conspiring to produce a very frightening situation for those with moral and religious standards.

In Europe, the abortion/liberal culture has resulted in a population unable morally to carry itself into the future. With the diminishing population of these formerly Catholic nations, has come a need for a work force, and filling this gap have been people from Africa and the Arabic and Middle East, most of them Muslim. Today, we see a two-cultured Europe, each part diametrically opposed. We see on the one hand, ghettos in many European cities filled with Muslim families, many of them having more children than their European counterparts; these young people grow up in hard economic conditions, and like the young black people in the ghettos of cities like New York and Los Angeles, they look for their identity in their ancestral roots and express them in a tribal/gang language. They are trying to survive; they see the injustice and the status quo around them in a Western society: and from this outside view, some of them do not get sucked into the materialism, but rather they see the corruption, the oppression, the immorality, the hypocrisy of words like "freedom" and "democracy" and "free market".

Many of them, in search of survival for their identity, misplaced as they are, look to their ancestors and the glory days of their former lands. When they look, they see Western troops occupying Iraq, placing pressure on Iran not to develop nuclear capability, and Israel building a Great Wall across Palestine with the silence of the West a deafening statement of cooperation.

Not all of what they see is reality; it is hard to ever see reality, because we are so dependent on images and news channels which have themselves a viewpoint, and a mandate to sell crisis. Often what is being filmed is, in reality, a tempest in a teapot. However, the damage is done when people's viewpoints are shaped by those images. The tempest then is let out of the pot and becomes a real storm. However, a lot of it is very real, and the real suffering no one often sees. Also, in such a 'small' world, we forget too often the very deep and old cultural differences and divisions: we do not all see the same thing alike, nor speak of it in the same way. Babel still holds sway, the one exception being within the family of Christ and His Church.

The young Muslims in Europe band together, much like the sixties generation over Vietnam; but their heritage and their religious narrative is much more lethal rather than immoral self-destruction. They strike out at the corruption in Western culture, but like vigilantes: thus was the killing of the filmaker Van Gogh (descendant of the painter) , who produced artistic pornography, porn with a message against religious and social fundamentalism, this just being one example of many incidents, not the least being the terrorism so prevalent. Now the governments are reacting: the banning of traditional religious Muslim wear. This, I believe, will be like putting kindling on an already burning fire. Also, there are incidents of Christian homeschoolers being threatened with losing their children in Germany, and nuns having to discard their headgear in the wake of the French "headscarf ban". Also, Catholics and Christians who are unwilling to take part in an abortion may have trouble getting through medical school or may lose their license to practice. In the Philipines, a vote is being taken on a population control policy that has been labelled "China-lite". And this in a country that is thought to be a majority of Catholics!

Meanwhile, in the Western nations, and in Israel, the homosexual lobby is gaining incredible strength- and as E. Michael Jones stated, the homosexual is the ideal secular/liberal citizen, fulfilling perfectly the twin demands of no children and materialism. Magistrates in Europe are threatened by legal suits and loss of jobs if they do not recognize the legal rights of homosexuals to marry eachother. I am not, here, condemning the soul of the person who calls himself homosexual, but rather the actions, personal, moral and legal, that are so damaging to him, to society, and are now beginning to be the prow of religious oppression.

Thus, there is a "clash of cultures"- or a clash of militant secular, individualistic pluralism with belief in God, belief in a moral and legal code that governs all people, belief in natural and theistic laws.

Now, put into this mix the nuclear crisis that is brewing in Iran, in an already volatile Middle East: and add a large handful of tension in the fact that most of the oil, oil that greases the economic machine of the world, comes from this area. I have also read that it is an over-looked fact that the oil in the earth is running out.

This brew sounds bad. The interesting thing to me is that all of these seemingly diverse and non-connected streams are now playing on eachother to create a new tune: I call it "Clamp-Down". I mean, it seems to me that the secular answer to this will be the few controlling the many, with the excuse that this will be the only way for people to survive.

The good news? God is in control. And as Our Lady of Pomain said, "My Son is moved by prayer." And to me, it seems that there will be a more black and white choice: for our Faith, or for the secular government- and to those with good will, it will become apparent that the only faith with any humanity, with any Godliness and charity and moral cohesion is the faith in Christ and His Church. The choice will be more clear than it has ever been, and this is a good thing.

As a friend said once, "It has never been easier to be a saint: all one has to do now is practice the Faith."

I finish with the thoughts of Yeats, in one of my personal favorites:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Wafts of Frankincense

We must not forget to stay, in spirit, around The Crib- from Christmas Eve until Epiphany; for it is on the “Little Christmas”, at the coming of the Three Kings, that Our Lord showed Himself to the gentiles, indicating that He had indeed come for all peoples, for “all men of good will”. If we leave The Crib, we miss this momentous event:

They come, those Three, more-than-kings, the Wise of the East. Their faces are inscrutable, hard lines etched in well-traveled countenances; one bears a design of dark kohl, a lattice-like mask around his eyes; another a robe bearing fantastic scenes embroidered in gold thread- not gilt, but real, gold-leaf thread. He shimmers like a living sunrise as he approaches on his knees. The other two take his well-intuited cue and also fall to their knees to shuffle slowly forward. Servants behind them, bearing bundles well-concealed, fall to their knees as well, unquestioning, following their masters. It is a silent, strange scene, the breathing and the drag of robes over small pebbles and discarded leaves.

These Three, reverently coming forward, are passing from the light of the torches (a strong and soldierly light, harsh and flickering) into the star-shadows of the small shrubs and towering cypresses that surround the tiny cave. Suddenly Joseph is there, holding an oil-lamp, peering into the dark to find out who is approaching. He sees the strange sight of the kings and their retinue. They stop. He looks into their eyes, holding all three in his glance, and then slowly nods his head, both in welcome and in humble respect.

Slowly, entering over the threshold, the lip of the cave that holds the thresh inside, they still themselves in reverence. St. Joseph is standing to the right of the manger, now carefully filled with wool and binding cloth, gifts from the shepherds. He has gently touched Our Lady’s shoulder, she who was dozing with the Holy Child in her arms. She wakes, and turns slowly, trying not to wake the Baby. As He sleeps, the Three Kings gaze upon the Child, upon the Mysterious King. Their Eastern eyes do not stray in confusion at the poverty and ignominy of the place, the clothes, the manger, and the animals; for they know that mystery and true greatness is not to be understood; that something larger than the world can indeed inhabit this tiny cave.

They know, too, that something in this Mystery is about a King who will give His very life for His beloved, this God who will empty Himself for His creatures; they know of the ancient pagan kings who were sacrificed to the gods to assuage wrath on a suffering tribe, and the subsequent ‘shadow kings’, or substitute sacrifices-and so they bring myrrh, a precious scent used for burial rites. They know, too, that this Mysterious King is far greater, far higher, than the ancient pagan kings, higher then themselves as the cypress trees to the blade of grass- therefore they bring Him frankincense, a precious sap, crystallized and used only in the liturgies of prayers to the Most High God.

These three, they bring their homage, their wisdom, their intuition, their most precious gifts, symbolic of their graced-understanding; but most of all, they bring hopes-hope of salvation for the gentiles.

Epiphany is the day for the world to cry out again, in hope: to send our prayers up like the wafts of frankincense: but they must be precious, careful and loving, like St. Bernadette’s beautiful Sign of the Cross. It is the day for the world to let go of its gold, putting its wealth at the feet of Christ the King, in His service. It is the day to hand the box of myrrh to glorious St. Joseph, to ask for our daily and final death to be taught to us by him. It is the day for the world to gaze anew at the Holy Family, and ask the Lord for forgiveness, and to rejoice that His answer is not sent, but that He comes Himself: to the Crib, to every Holy Sacrifice of the Mass- and again as Judge at the end of time.