Mar 19 Wed
How did St. Joseph pray?
The serene and strong figure of St. Joseph surprises us: the Gospels do not convey any of his words, and his actions were simple, without much drama.
Although his life was not marked by significant external actions, it was full of internal activity. We see a man who knew how to respond to challenges from the silence of prayer and who, as a result, was able to carry out his works with the freedom that comes from true love.
The Gospels speak of what Joseph "did," but not of his life of deep contemplation. St. John Paul II told us that his whole life was true prayer. St. Joseph was attentive to the voice of God behind all events and people. This enabled him to hear God even in the faint images of dreams.
While he slept, he discovered his vocation, which would fill all his days with a sense of mission: to care for Jesus and Mary.
An angel visited him by night to reveal God's plan. Even then, we do not hear Joseph's response to the angelic message; he simply did what God asked him to do.
Between St. Joseph's interior life and his external actions, we see no discontinuity because he transformed his life into a path of prayer. He turned God's dream into his own.
Our life of prayer leads us, like St. Joseph, to always seek refuge in the Lord. The Holy Patriarch was able to endure everything, because he knew how to put his heart in Jesus: with Him, every situation becomes pleasant. He never saw his vocation as a set of obligations but as the undeserved gift of being able to live at all times with the Son of God.
We too can live in the hidden life of Christ. The lives of Joseph and Mary developed in constant dialogue with Jesus: they lived to see the Lord grow, but they were the ones who grew in the eyes of God. They cared for Jesus in a humble house in Nazareth while God protected them in His love.
True prayer, when it is an open dialogue with God, gives us the possibility of viewing the world, in some way, from His perspective. Then our life acquires a different, unsuspected dimension, like that of St. Joseph, who knew how to place faith and love in the hope of the great mission that God was initiating in the world: the redemption of mankind. And God did so by using him—a carpenter from Galilee.
Joseph never put himself at the center. He knew how to be out of the limelight, placing Mary and Jesus at the center of his life.
Prayer makes us truly free because it allows us to enter into the logic of self-giving, which makes us lighter and helps us give the right weight to each event.
When we live in constant dialogue with God, our lives are no longer chained to our likes or dislikes, although these do not cease to exist. Nor do our miseries worry us too much, because we know that He comes to help us and turn them into a source of grace, as were Christ's wounded hands and open side.
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