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Seeing Jesus Through The Love of His Earthly Father, Joseph
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Seeing Jesus Through The Love of His Earthly Father, Joseph
My Father’s name was Joseph and I attended St. Joseph elementary school, but it wasn’t until I experienced a “reversion” in the early 1990s that I developed a devotion to St. Joseph.
I believe that I began receiving graces from Jesus and Mary that was awakening my dormant faith. During that time, I started going to daily Mass and, at one of the parishes I attended, I met a person who told me about the Pieta booklet [a prayer booklet], so I started using it to pray many prayers in that booklet. That was when I was drawn to the prayer of St. Joseph. As I contemplated the words of the prayer, in particular, “I never weary contemplating you and Jesus asleep in your arms…”, I feel it humanized St. Joseph more for me in that I saw him as a father who held Jesus, comforted Him and took an active part in raising Him. Imagine how St. Joseph must have felt to hold God in his hands.
In 1997, my wife, Sally, and I were blessed to have our first grandchild and we were blessed to babysit for him one day each week. When I would hold him and other grandchildren that followed, I would recite the St. Joseph prayer and think of the gift from God that I was able to hold in my hands. I could relate to St. Joseph holding baby Jesus and caressing Him as I did with our grandchildren.
Now that our grandchildren are young adults, the St. Joseph prayer remains meaningful to me because of the parts of the prayer that follow, i.e., “Press Him in my name and kiss His fine head for me, and ask Him to return the kiss when I draw my dying breath.” When I pray this, I am asking St. Joseph, the Patron of a Happy Death, to intercede with Jesus for me, especially at the hour of my death. So, we have Mary, our heavenly Mother, leading us to Her Son and St. Joseph also interceding for us.
I continue to pray the St. Joseph prayer each morning and Sally and I add this prayer at the end of our daily Rosary.
One additional comment on St. Joseph. My Uncle John had a devotion to St. Joseph. He once told me that he felt St. Joseph saved his life during World War II. He said he saw a German soldier shooting at a Medic and my Uncle put out his hand to push the Medic out of the way. The bullet hit my Uncle’s hand as well as in the chest right where he kept the St. Joseph prayer. His only injury was to his hand.
St. Joseph, pray for us.
