Our Glorious Saint Joseph

Yesterday was the feast of St Joseph. Let us listen to the words of a few saintly souls and then end with a prayer.

He (St Joseph) was head of the divine household on earth with, as it were, fatherly authority; he has the Church dedicated to his loyalty and protection. Such a person possesses so surpassing a dignity that no honor exists which should not be paid him. – Pope Leo XIII

We may well call St. Joseph the martyr of the hidden life, for no one ever suffered as he did. But why so much sorrow in his life? Simply because the holier a person is, the more he must suffer for the love and glory of God. Suffering is the flowering of God’s grace in a soul and the triumph of the soul’s love for God. Therefore, St. Joseph, the greatest of saints after Mary, suffered more than all the martyrs. The source of his suffering lay in his deep, tender, and enlightened love for Jesus and in his veneration for the Virgin Mary. All the elect must climb the hill of Calvary, and it is only through the wounds in His hands and feet that they reach the heart of Jesus. It is not so much a question of penitence as of love; penitence only pays a debt, but love goes further and crucifies itself with Jesus and for Jesus. It is a truth then that the more a soul loves, the more it suffers. That is why St. Joseph’s Calvary lasted thirty years with no respite whatever. When he was honored with the dignity of foster-father of Christ, the Cross was set up in his heart and he labored in its shadow for the rest of his life. – St Peter Julian Eymard

Devotion to St. Joseph is one of the choicest graces that God can give to a soul, for it is tantamount to revealing the entire treasury of Our Lord’s graces. – St Peter Julian Eymard

Be in good spirits under the fatherly mantle of St. Joseph, a place of safest refuge in trials and tribulations. – St Joseph Marello

O Glorious Patriarch and Patron of the Church! O Virgin Spouse of the Virgin Mother of God! O Guardian and Virginal Father of the Word Incarnate! In the presence of Jesus and Mary, I choose you this day to be my father, my guardian, and my protector. O great St. Joseph, whom God has made the Head of the Holy Family, accept me, I beseech you, though utterly unworthy, to be a member of your “Holy House.” Present me to your Immaculate Spouse; ask her also to adopt me as her child. With her, pray that I may constantly think of Jesus, and serve him faithfully to the end of my life. O Terror of Demons, increase in me virtue, protect me from the evil one, and help me not to offend God in any way. O my Spiritual Father, I hereby consecrate myself to you. In faithful imitation of Jesus and Mary, I place myself and all my concerns under your care and protection. To you, after Jesus and Mary, I consecrate my body and soul, with all their faculties, my spiritual growth, my home, and all my affairs and undertakings. Forsake me not, but adopt me as a servant and child of the Holy Family. Watch over me at all times, but especially at the hour of my death. Console and strengthen me with the presence of Jesus and Mary so that, with you, I may praise and adore the Holy Trinity for all eternity. Amen.

All quotes and the consecration from Consecration to St. Joseph by Fr Donald Calloway, MIC

Ite Ad Joseph!

Previously, we discussed some of the benefits of making St Joseph an important figure in our lives. Honestly though, why is this? Why Saint Joseph rather than one of the female saints? After all, we are women trying to regain our lost femininity. We are trying to regain our true selves and fulfill our vocation as women. Why should we look to a man, even if he is a saint, to help us attain this elevated state? How is it that he could be of more help to us than a woman saint?

The answer couldn’t be more simple.

St Joseph lived with Our Lady. He lived with her who chose not Eve’s path of false womanhood, but the path of true womanhood. He lived with her who not only followed the path of true womanhood, but is the perfection of womanhood. He lived with her who embodied everything that each woman is called to be in bearing and grace, in knowledge and humility, in compassion, kindness, strength, prudence and Prayer. In the quickening of the hearts of others and inspiring them to virtue, in bringing culture and civilization. In a word, in living to the full; sanity and sanctity.

Saint Joseph lived with the New Eve. He loved and served her. As her chaste spouse he witnessed her fulfill her feminine vocation unerringly. He knows more than any other person what a true woman is. He knows her demeanor and bearing, her thoughts free of the entanglements of the Fall, and the virtues she should possess. He is one heart and mind with the perfect woman!

He wills to aid us in our quest of fighting the old Eve and putting on the new. He wills that we should be true and holy women! With his intimate knowledge of the perfect woman, Our Lady, he will shape and mold us into true images of her. True Marian apparitions!

Any words of mine regarding this glorious saint are horribly inadequate. I will have to let the saints do the talking for me…

O, what pure love the virgin spouses had for each other! More than Adam and Eve in the early days of their innocence, Joseph and Mary were the delight of the Lord, the ecstasy of angels in the humble home of Nazareth. Nazareth was similar to Eden in the first days of creation: everything was holy, everything was innocent, everything was beautiful! – Blessed Bartolo Longo

He who knew the holiness, innocence and beauty of the New Eden in Nazareth, wants to aid us in regaining it. He wants to help us win back our dignity and desires this for us as much as do his holy spouse and foster Son.

Just as Mary by her motherhood of the Saviour became the mother of us all, so too does Joseph as the earthly father of Jesus and virginal spouse of Mary, become our father. He led, protected, provided for and loved Jesus and Mary, perfectly! He feels the same towards us and desires to help us if we but call upon him!

Saint Joseph, with the love and generosity with which he guarded Jesus, so too will he guard your soul, and as he defended him from Herod, so will he defend your soul from the fiercest Herod: the devil! All the care that the Patriarch St. Joseph has for Jesus, he has for you and will always help you with his patronage. He will free you from the persecution of the wicked and proud Herod, and will not allow your heart to be estranged from Jesus. Ite ad Joseph! Go to Joseph with extreme confidence, because I do not remember having asked anything from St. Joseph, without having obtained it readily. – St Pio of Pietrelcina

Give yourself to him as a loving child, confident that he will work great wonders in your soul and lead you safely to authentic feminine regeneration and ultimately to Heaven. Ite ad Joseph, dear friends!

Reclaiming our Identity

How do we regain what was stolen from us? Namely, the exquisite bearing and burnished beauty of a whole and complete woman.

The first step is perhaps the hardest and the most puzzling. It is to realize that everything our culture has taught us to believe is false. The role and dignity of women has been perverted by our modern, secularized, post-Catholic culture. Views we simply take for granted—such as the belief that a woman has to work and if she chooses not to she is not only failing society in general, but damaging her own psyche and self worth—need to be uprooted from our brains. Perhaps we think they have been, but isn’t there still a part of us that cringes when we are around those ‘truly successful’ women? A part of us that wonders if we will ever match up? Hopefully you see how deeply the cancer has insinuated itself into the fibers of our being.

The good news is that it really is just a sickness. An alien part of ourselves that doesn’t belong and that the hosts of Heaven want to help us eradicate.

The best role model we have for curing this illness is the Queen of Heaven and our Mother. Why? Because she is the opposite in every way to Eve, our mother. Eve chose to become her own ‘goddess’ by trying to be like God. In reality, if she had humbled herself and followed God’s law, he would have given her a share in his glory. A goddess of sorts is what she would have become. Before you shout Heresy! please remember that St Peter says we will be ‘partakers of the divine nature’.¹ And the Catechism states rather eloquently that

“The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature”: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.” “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.”²

This is indeed a high calling and a priceless gift! Yet how do we attain to this without following in Eve’s footsteps and trying to make ourselves gods or goddesses instead of partakers in the divine nature? Doing which is condemned time and again in holy writ.

One way, and a good first step towards conquering and rejecting the fallen nature of Eve, is to consecrate ourselves to Mary, the New and Perfect Eve. Do not be discouraged by the immaculate purity and insuperable perfection of Mary. She knows that we are weak daughters of Eve blindly trying to find our way back to our true dignity and she wants to help us. By consecrating ourselves to her, our queen³, we pledge ourselves more fully to her. We bind ourselves to her in a covenant of love. Father Kentenich, who spent three years in the Dachau concentration camp during World War II, promoted a method of Marian consecration he called the covenant of love. ‘He believed that a covenant of love with Mary would transform the world by turning those consecrated to her into ‘apparitions of Mary.’⁴

In other words, by uniting ourselves more fully to her and imitating her virtues, we become ‘apparitions of Mary’ for the world. Images of the Perfect Woman and Queen of Heaven. The more we become her apparition, her image, the more we will become the true women God created us to be. The more God’s glory will shine through us and draw others towards the Truth and the fulfillment of their vocations as men and as women.

1 2 Peter 1:4 RSV

2 Catechism of the Catholic Church #460

3 See the Book of Revelation 12:1 RSV

4 Excerpt from Consecration to St. Joseph by Fr Donald Calloway, MIC

Feminine Vocation

My image of the woman I want to be is almost ethereal. A woman clothed with the light of grace. Lustrous in the virtues and shedding light and love on those around her. Perfect in form and beauty, graceful and delicate, yet possessing an inner strength and resolve surpassing the powers of comprehension. Engendering virtue in those around her and the desire to ‘be’. To become fully themselves. Thinking of this woman stirs deep within me the desire hidden in each woman to fulfill her destiny. Her God given call to be a woman in every sense of the word.

You might be thinking that this is way off course and how could I possibly assert that this desire and vocation is within the deepest fiber of each woman’s being. Try to empty your minds of the modern nonsense we have been taught to believe almost from the cradle. Forget all of it. All of the insistence that the only true woman is she who works 40+ hours a week and is rising among the ranks of her coworkers. Forget the insistence that this woman must literally be super woman and come home after that long work day and cook and clean and help the kids with their homework. Heaven forbid that this wife and mother be a stay at home mom who raises her own children and guides their steps towards knowledge and truth. This image of the stay at home mom, put even this from your minds. We speak of a deeper truth. One that holds such power and is such a priceless gem, that God in his desire to bequeath it to each woman wrote it in their hearts.

How do we know it is in our hearts? The easiest way to show this is by an example. If we humble ourselves and pay attention to children they can teach us so much. They are simple and filled with unassuming faith, faith that wasn’t taught but is present in their very beings. They are not tainted by the darkness and unbelief of the world. They just ‘are’. Much can be learned from them. My nieces came for a visit the other day and they brought home to me just how deeply even little women yearn to fulfill their feminine vocation. We have hanging in our home a longsword five feet in length. It is the Ranger sword of Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings and was my Christmas gift to my wonderful husband. Also hanging on the wall is a tapestry. Yes, I really said tapestry. Made in the USofA on old-fashioned machinery, it is an image of the magnificent painting God Speed by Edmund Blair Leighton.

One of my nieces looked at the sword and asked if it was real or plastic and why we had it on our wall. After she had heard the answers that yes it was real and its just a cool thing to have on the wall, she said “that’s weird.” After that simple statement of dismissal the sword was ignored. The tapestry however caught and held the girls attention. They were spellbound by it. Why were they so captivated? For the same reason that it causes my soul to soar each time I look at it. The image is a small glimpse of what we women are called and long to be. Strong yet gentle, beautiful yet humble, possessing virtue yet unassuming, providing strength and courage for the man with whom our soul is united yet retaining feminine grace and simplicity, having the courage to fight for those we love yet doing so from behind the scenes and through prayer, being the ever present image in the heart of our beloved that helps him to go on and by our embodiment of all that it means to be feminine and a true woman after God’s own heart, causing a river of grace to flow and those around us to be even unconsciously raised to a higher plain.

This excerpt from Three to Get Married by Fulton Sheen is eloquent.

“Beauty of body attracts the eyes; beauty of soul attracts God. Man sees the face; God sees the soul. Mary’s beautiful purity must have been such that it attracted less the eyes than the souls of men. No one would have loved her mind or soul because of the beauty of her body, but they would have so loved her beauty of soul as almost to forget she even had a body. It is very likely that a human eye, looking on Mary, would scarcely have been conscious that she was beautiful to the eye. Just as corrupt men are made pure in thought by the sight of an innocent child, so all fleshly thoughts would have been left behind, by one vision of the Immaculate Mother. As one listens to a consummate artist playing the piano, one forgets that he has hands; so, in the ravishing melodies of Mary’s Immaculateness, one would have hardly adverted to that fleshly keyboard from which they came. When one is overjoyed by the beauty of a picture, he does not pay much attention to the frame.”

Mary is the New Eve. She is what Eve and all of her daughters were supposed to be. Through her example and with her help, we can regain what was once stolen.

The Tapestry is from http://www.finearttapestries.com/ The sword was from https://www.unitedcutlery.com/ though purchased at Amazon.

To Be or Not To Be

To be, or not to be. That is the question, isn’t it? This line has been used in many and diverse ways since Shakespeare penned it so long ago. In this instance as I borrow the saying of The Bard, the question in my mind is a hard one indeed. It is whether I shall truly be a woman and fulfill my God given vocation as a woman, or whether I will not.

But what exactly is the vocation of a woman? We are often filled with the notion that we are called either to marriage, or to the convent. Added to this, there is the none too subtle insistence that to be truly useful members of society women must have a high paying job and have lip service paid to them by those domineering men. No other path is ours to take. To a certain extent this is true. Women will either marry or enter the religious life, have a job or simply work at home. But I would like to put forth the hypothesis that in order to fulfill either of these callings, the foundation must be built. If this foundation is rock, or better yet, marble or diamond or gold, our vocation as a wife and mother, as a nun, or as an employee, will be more fruitful for ourselves and for those to whom we are bound, both physically and spiritually.

This foundation is our God given vocation to be a woman. You might be laughing right now and considering me to be either delusional, daft, or just plain stupid. But hear me out.

Let’s go back to the beginning. When our parents co-created us with God himself, it was God who gave us our sex. It was he who decided that we would be women. As women, he endowed us with a purpose and even gave us a share in certain of his attributes. God creates nothing that is bad. He only creates what is good. And if it is good, it must share specially in his goodness in one way or the other. What is one of the attributes that God has shared with women in an exceptional way? If we can answer this question, we can unlock a fundamental secret to living as a true woman, to living as God desires and created us to live.

This attribute is beauty.

God is infinite Beauty Itself and he created a world that is full to overflowing with beauty. Women are called to share in this attribute. To be beautiful and to bring beauty to those around them. Usually, a woman is happier and more confident about herself when she feels beautiful and when her husband or family sees that she is beautiful. We take time to decide what to wear and make sure the color schemes match and go well with our hair and skin tones. We choose which jewelry will look the best. We take time to do our hair and put on makeup. Etc. etc. etc. We are in fact called to take care of ourselves and to look beautiful, because God wants us to show his attribute of Beauty in ourselves. By showing beauty and grace in our outward appearance, we give God glory and provide the souls around us an opportunity to have their souls lifted to their creator by seeing this simple fulfillment of God’s plan for us.

The outer appearance though is only one facet of a woman’s vocation. Beauty must be interior as well. Women are called to make their souls shine with the love of God. We must constantly try to climb the mountain of holiness until we reach Beauty Himself. It’s a life long process and we will most likely not see when our souls start to glimmer with the diamonds and gold of our love of God. This beauty will be visible to God, our ultimate lover and it will be visible to those around us, because holiness shines through in the lives of those who attain it. The more we fulfill this vocation in our souls, the more we will be able to draw others to the love of God and win many graces for them.

In addition to showing forth God’s beauty in ourselves, we are called to bring beauty to those around us, whether it is our home, our work place, our Church. Wherever women are present, there is an increase in beauty be it flowers or works of art, home décor or tidiness.

There are so many examples of how women are called to be beautiful and to bring beauty. I hope to write more of my thoughts on this in the future, but for now, I hope an example will suffice. I was blessed to go to Ireland with my husband for our honeymoon. One of the Churches we visited was St Augustine and St John the Baptist in Dublin. This was one of the only churches we found in the city that was still Roman Catholic. The others had all been taken over. The side chapels in this haven showed forth in such brilliance how the Church sees men and women, their differences and their strengths. The way in which these differences are displayed for imitation in Our Lord and Our Lady was breathtaking. It was truly a very powerful experience for me and still fills me with awe and joy whenever I think of it. It also feeds a desire to fulfill my vocation of beauty as a woman and a wife and that men would fulfill their vocations as men. I hope the following explanation and pictures will furnish inspiration and food for meditation for you as it has done me.

The side chapel of Our Lady showed forth the woman’s gift of sharing in God’s beauty. This chapel was bright with the color blue. Fleur-de-lis were present everywhere the eye could see, including the stone arches enshrining the chapel. The art work was lovely and airy in a way. Perhaps reminiscent of the medieval ladies. Strong and brave, yet beautiful, attractive and delectable. This chapel raised the soul to God in a way that made one forget his awesome and mighty countenance and remember only his love. It caused the soul to revel only in the beauty of her who is a woman’s model. To go to her with utter confidence, bathed in light and beauty and certain of a loving embrace from her and the love and acceptance of God.

The side chapel to the Sacred Heart seemed to exemplify through the mind and the art of the Church that men are called to share in God’s attribute of Power. This chapel, while beautiful, was so in a very masculine, strong and almost stark way. The color tones were deep crimson and subtle. The etching was very masculine. Images of the Lamb and the Sacred Heart were present, even on the stone arches. It raised up the soul in a way that offered consolation, while at the same time driving home the fact that Our Lord is strong, stern and powerful. A true monarch that demands respect and fealty while also wanting love. It reminded me that when men truly fulfill their vocations as men, they are leaders who not only lead, but guide with love and cherish those in their care. Quite contrary to the misconstrued image of men that pervades our culture on both the right and the left today.

To quote Dostoevsky, “beauty will save the world.”

He is Risen, as He said!

Surrexit Dominus Vere!! The Lord is risen indeed!! Alleluia, Alleluia!

In the same instant in which the most holy soul of Christ entered and gave life to his body the joy of her immaculate soul…overflowed into her immaculate body. And this overflow was so exquisite in its effects, that she was transformed from sorrow to joy, from pain to delight. From grief to ineffable jubilation and rest. It happened that just at this time the Evangelist John, as he had done on the previous morning, stepped in to visit Her and console Her in her bitter solitude and thus unexpectedly, in the midst of splendor and glory, met Her, whom he had before scarcely recognized on account of her overwhelming sorrow…

In this new joy and under the divine influences of her supernatural vision the great Lady began to prepare Herself for the visit of the Lord, which was near at hand. While eliciting acts of praise, and in her canticles and prayers, She immediately felt within Her a new kind of jubilation and celestial delight, reaching far beyond the first joy, and corresponding in a wonderful manner to the sorrows and tribulations She had undergone in the Passion…

The blessed Mary being thus prepared, Christ our Savior, arisen and glorious, in the company of all the Saints and Patriarchs, made his appearance. The ever humble Queen prostrated Herself upon the ground and adored her divine Son; and the Lord raised Her up and drew Her to Himself. In this contact, which was more intimate than the contact with the humanity and the wounds of the Savior sought be Magdalen, the Virgin Mother participated in an extraordinary favor, which She alone, as exempt from sin, could merit. Although it was not the greatest of the favors She attained on this occasion, yet She could not have received it without failing of her faculties, if She had not been previously strengthened by the angels and by the Lord himself. This favor was, that the glorious body of the Son so closely united itself to that of his purest Mother, that He penetrated into it or She into his, as when, for instance, a crystal globe takes up within itself the light of the sun and is saturated with the splendor and beauty of its light. In the same way the body of the most holy Mary entered into that of her divine Son by this heavenly embrace; it was, as it were, the portal of her intimate knowledge concerning the glory of the most holy soul and body of her Lord. As a consequence of these favors, constituting higher and higher degrees of ineffable gifts, the spirit of the Virgin Mother rose to the knowledge of the most hidden sacraments. In the midst of them she heard a voice saying to Her: “My beloved, ascend higher!” By the power of these words She was entirely transformed and saw the Divinity clearly and intuitively, wherein She found complete, though only temporary, rest and reward for all her sorrows and labors. Silence alone here is proper, since reason and language are entirely inadequate to comprehend or express what passed in the blessed Mary during this beatific vision, the highest She had until then enjoyed. Let us celebrate this day in wonder and praise, with congratulations and loving and humble thanks for what She then merited for us, and for her exaltation and joy.

Excerpts from The Mystical City of God by the Venerable Mary of Agreda. Book III The Transfixion Chapter XXVI numbers 758-760.

Image: The Risen Christ appears to the Virgin
Giovanni Francesco Guercino, 1623

Our Lady Queen of Peace

If you are like me, there is so much stress, uncertainty, fear and sadness right now that at times the walls seam to be caving in. Distracting ourselves with something, anything would bring so much relief!! But where can we find this source of joy when everywhere there are reminders of the uncertain times? When we are faced with worry over our jobs or those of loved ones. When reports are coming in fast and furious with higher and higher numbers of those who have caught the virus, and those who have succumbed to its strength. It is a bleak time, no doubt about it.

While men are tasked with worrying about the well-being of their wives and families, and have the primary duty of providing for and protecting us, they are generally blessed with the gift (and curse) of compartmentalizing. They are very likely nearly as stressed as we are, but they can turn off that box or close the door on that room in their brains and think of or do something else. Women are far less likely to be able to do this regularly, if at all.

For us, our brains are wired to take care of our husband and family. This doesn’t mean just going to work or defending them when the need arises. No, we must think of every little thing from the moment we get up to the time we go to bed, from feeding them, clothing them, making sure their clothes are washed, doing the housework, tending their sniffles and the myriad other things that often aren’t even noticed. For us, most things are interconnected and thinking of one thing means we think of another and another and how to solve three or four problems at once. Before you know it, we are so flustered, worried and just plain stressed out that we resemble more a puddle on the floor or an irate child, than we do a mature woman.

Knowing this about ourselves is the first step to improving, so congratulations!! Now for the hard part.

We have to get off the floor, clean up the puddle and march. Truly, march. I am not jesting. Think of Our Lady during the Via Dolorosa. Her world was quite literally ending, for the very Light and entire meaning of her life was suffering untold agony and going to his death. What did she do? She squared her shoulders and marched. Sounds a bit like St Teresa’s desire for manly women. Mary, our mother, walked the way of the cross suffering along with her son. She kept going, even though the darkness surrounding her and piercing her soul was absolute and impenetrable.

I have been thinking of three things that Our Lady had during her agony. Perhaps sharing them may offer some consolation and encouragement to others.

The first was a love for Christ and for his Church. Make no mistake, Mary knew exactly what he was doing and why. Her love for him caused her both to want to suffer with him and to desire what he desired…our salvation.

Number two was an indefatigable hope (despite the attempted seriousness of this post, I will digress and admit that I have loved that wonderful word ever since I discovered Horatio Hornblower and his adventures on the Indefatigable as a girl! 🙂 But back to the business at hand.) Hope. Yes, Our Lady realized that the suffering she was enduring was not meaningless, nor was it without merit. Our Lord was permitting it for her own good and for the good of the world. The light would dawn, the sun would rise and by her fidelity that same sun would shine on a better world.

Lastly, and perhaps least noticed among the many lessons at the Cross, Our Lady had a man by her side to comfort, cherish and love her. Of course Our Lord fulfills all of these things, but he gave her to John. “And from that moment the apostle took her into his home.” She was now his. In reality, she was his responsibility, his duty and his sustaining love. But what was he to her? As Queen of the universe, she did not really need him. She embraced St John as an example for all women throughout time, whether married or single, lay or religious. Women need men, not because we are not strong without them, but because we are stronger with them.

Now to employ these things in our lives. By endeavoring to make Our Lord the center of our lives as he so desperately wants to be, we will begin doing everything for love of him and for souls. The more we love him, the more we will be able to offer up each moment of our day to him. The more we love him, the more we will love our husband and family. As we grow in this aspect, we will be able to gain more graces for our families and the Church.

But what about hope? In daily life, the more we love Our Lord, the more we long for heaven and hope to be with him there. The more we love our husband and family, the more the hope in us grows that we will be together forever in heaven. Hope helps us to keep going and to persevere, even in difficult times. This too shall pass. The more we try to practice the virtue of hope, the more we will be able to look at daily trials or pandemics, as trials for us to bear, after which the sun will shine on a brighter world.

Lastly, lets remember the support St John gave to Our Lady. God willing, we have a good man in our lives who can fulfill that role of comforter and helper along our path to holiness. Men can comfort us in ways that we cannot comfort ourselves or each other. And sometimes, just being hugged by our husband is all we need to make the world feel like a better place. I dare say each woman needs a man in her life, whether he is her father, brother, husband. Even nuns live this reality, for they have the most manly and comforting of men, Our Lord himself, as their spouse.

May Our Lady grant us peace, strength and perseverance in this and all trials.