On the solemnity of St. Joseph, I had the joy of having breakfast with a priest friend today. We don't often get together to rejoice, since my travel makes it difficult. He is a very good young priest who is a wonderful example of conscientious dedication. I reserve the right not to name him, since his pastoral appointment isn't an easy one. He deserves a prayer, fair and gentle reader. He invited me to one of those delicious American eateries that load your plate until it is hidden by food and swimming in gravy. What a feast for St. Joseph!
I was thinking today of a little phrase that I read in the Redemptoris Custos of Bl. John Paul II on St. Joseph. He made mention of priests as being like St. Joseph as 'itinerant contemplatives'. I am struck by these words. St. Joseph was often driven by circumstances that were completely out of his hands. He experienced such dreadful persecution in his life, he had to leave the country of his birth. And even though he experienced all of that, he was a contemplative.
Sometimes we imagine the contemplative vocation as something extremely exclusive. We imagine that only those who live behind papal enclosure are true contemplatives. But that would be a grave error. To be a contemplative is to; daily, hourly recall the primacy of God and the superiority of spirituality to all else. And St. Joseph therefore was thoroughly a contemplative … even though he had sufferings, and complications and all sorts of troubles. He was ever contemplating Our Lady and the Christ Child.
He was a contemplative because he was so close … physically close to Our Blessed Lord. Priests are unique in that we handle the Most Blessed Sacrament every day. We are physically close to the Sacred Humanity and the Divine Person, Jesus Christ. This should make us contemplatives.
Priests don't have the luxury of the grill or the grand silence of a monastery. Instead, the hubbub of ordinary life teams around them, and so they, like St. Joseph, have to face Our Lord with their heart and not get disheartened by the activity.
Every good priest considers at some point or another the lovely idea of leaving his parish ministry or whatever ministry he has, to enter a cloister "to go and weep for his sins" as St. Jean Vianney used to say. But the more the temptation is to flee, the more the priest must aspire to look only at Jesus.
Commend your priest to the goodness of St. Joseph. He will help your priest to love the Sacred Heart.
