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.
