Few Are Like You

Few are like you…

O Joseph, confidant of the angel,

righteous man of the first New Covenant, and the first to whom heaven spoke,

in you there is a hidden mystery that draws us to you and amazes us;

in you there is sweetness, the freshness of youth and the maturity of old age.

What speaks most in you is your silence, and what moves us most is your calm,

so silent and so calm that even the wood in your hands grew envious of you.

Your silence cries out in the wilderness of noise we live in today,

and your hiddenness is a slap in the face of anyone panting after the spotlight.

Few are like you!

Few are those who work in the light while staying steady in the shadow,

few are those who fill their role without filling the square with shouting,

few are those who make do with the fewest words, and even the fewest feelings,

few are those who serve and then, without anyone noticing, slip away and leave.

You, Joseph, did your duty in full without receiving your due in full;

you exercised fatherhood without being a “father”;

you were husband to a woman without “knowing” your wife;

you were the pillar of the house and the guardian of the treasure, yet you were “absent” from the house at the hour of homage and the offering of gifts.

In your hiddenness there is a divine breath and a spark of the light of that divine Child in your arms;

you hid yourself as you watched the One heaven had announced hiding himself;

you melted into silence as you saw “the Saviour” unable to find himself a safe place, even in Bethlehem, “the least among the clans of Judah”;

you hid yourself and kept silent, and let God alone speak in you and order all things.

Wake from your sleep, Joseph, and come to us!

Break your silence, speak, talk to us and teach us;

teach us to love Jesus and his mother, you who split your heart in two, between “the child and his mother”;

teach us to take them wherever they like to dwell…

to where they are not found, to our “Egypt”, the symbol of our slavery;

teach us to protect them like the apple of our eye from all harm,

from the evil our own hands do… from the “Herod” nesting in us too,

from the dangers of our pride and the whims of our restlessness.

Let them come down upon us as warmth and peace, and wash our souls with purity and our hearts with righteousness;

then we will be in Christmas… and Christmas will be in us.

Archbishop Milad Jawich (from his book Take the Child and His Mother)