Prayer to the Father
Eternal Father, source of all light and of all paternity in heaven and on earth:
your Word made flesh, Jesus Christ our Lord, wanted to learn to obey and love
in the silence of the home of Nazareth,
under the watchful and humble gaze of Joseph, your faithful servant.
You wanted to entrust to this just man the two greatest wonders of your love:
Jesus, your beloved Son, and Mary, the one full of grace.
Make us, as we contemplate his quiet faith, his prompt obedience,
his hidden strength and his clean and faithful heart,
learn also to live the Gospel in the simplicity of each day,
to guard the grace received
and to persevere in goodness even when the night seems long.
Your Son wanted to live subject to Joseph on earth,
because in this holy Patriarch you placed a mystery of spiritual paternity
for your entire Church.
Grant us, therefore, that as we approach him with filial confidence
we learn the hidden fidelity of Nazareth,
the prompt obedience to your will
and the silent love that sustains the Christian life.
Through Jesus Christ, your Son,
who wanted to live subject to the earthly authority of the carpenter of Nazareth
and to love him with filial love.
Amen.
Invocation to the Holy Spirit
Come, Holy Spirit, gentle light that filled the house of Nazareth with grace.
Form in us the Heart of Christ according to the strong and faithful model of Saint Joseph,
so that we learn from him silent obedience,
the purity of the soul and the fidelity that does not tire.
You who inspired Teresa of Jesus with such great love for this glorious Patriarch, kindle in us too that same filial affection,
so that we may experience what she herself affirmed with such simplicity and firmness:
«I took this glorious Saint Joseph as my advocate and lord, and commended myself greatly to him…
I do not remember up to now having asked him for anything that he has not granted.»
Amen.
Blessed Joseph, today I turn my eyes to another mystery of your life: your love for Mary. If great was the charge you received to guard the Son of God, no less was that of receiving into your home the most beautiful woman who has ever existed, the one full of grace, the one chosen from all eternity to be the Mother of the Incarnate Word. Here is revealed, Joseph, the highest nobility of your heart: God gave you Mary as your wife, and you knew how to love her with such luminous purity that the Church has found no more appropriate words to name you than these: most chaste spouse.
Your love was not a poor or diminished love; it was a greater love, cleaner, stronger, because it was entirely ordered to God. You loved Mary with the tenderness proper to a spouse and at the same time you looked at her with the reverence inspired by God’s singular work. You did not want to possess the mystery that the Lord had placed in your hands; you wanted to guard it. In that love of yours is manifested a form of greatness that the world barely understands: the greatness of one who knows how to love without appropriating, to serve without imposing oneself, and to rejoice more in God’s work than in one’s own affirmation. You received Mary into your home with profound humility; you accompanied her in the mystery that was taking place in her; you watched over her honor when no one yet understood God’s designs. And thus your love became an alliance of silent fidelity, a communion of hearts entirely oriented toward the Lord.
What profound delicacy there was in your soul, Joseph; only a truly clean heart can love in that way: with human love and at the same time with supernatural reverence; with affectionate closeness and with such great respect that it recognizes in the loved one a work of God that must be guarded. In your love for Mary shines the beauty of that interior chivalry that elevates human love and purifies it: there is in you no possession or dominion, but faithful care; no disordered desire, but a strong tenderness that protects, sustains and gives itself.
Teresa of Jesus, who spoke of you with such familiarity, exhorts me to trust in your patronage: «I would want to persuade everyone to be devoted to this glorious Saint, for the great experience I have of the goods he obtains from God.» She knew well that whoever approaches you inevitably learns to love the Virgin better and to understand more deeply the beauty of Christian love.
Today the world speaks much of love and understands it little; it confuses loving with possessing, wanting with dominating, desiring with giving oneself. Many times it reduces love to a passing feeling or to an egoistic search for satisfaction, forgetting that true love is always a form of donation. But you teach me something else: you teach me that true love knows how to respect, knows how to guard, knows how to serve and knows how to rejoice in the good of the other more than in one’s own.
Teach me, blessed Joseph, my father and lord, the strong purity that makes a man master of himself; that virile delicacy that knows how to treat others with respect and chivalry, and that interior nobility that is born of true love. Teach me to look at others as you looked at Mary: with profound respect, with gratitude for God’s work in each soul, with a love that does not seek to appropriate, but to protect and help grow.
And make me learn also, Joseph, to love the Virgin more, because whoever approaches you always discovers in your heart a sure path to Her; and whoever loves Mary finds Jesus, the blessed fruit of her womb and the center of all your life in Nazareth.
Concluding Prayer to the Most Holy Virgin
Most holy Mary, faithful Spouse of the glorious Patriarch Saint Joseph
and blessed Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ:
your life was inseparably united to that of that just man
to whom God entrusted the care of your days and the custody of the eternal Son made Child.
You knew better than anyone the silent nobility of Joseph:
his quiet faith, his prompt obedience, his clean heart,
his humble work in the workshop of Nazareth,
his loving vigilance over the Child who slept under your roof.
You saw how, day after day,
he sustained the life of the Holy Family with the effort of his hands;
how he watched over you in the uncertain nights;
how he obeyed the voice of God
even when the path opened amid shadows.
And beside him you yourself lived that hidden life that the world barely knows,
but that heaven contemplates with admiration:
life of deep prayer and humble work,
of silent mortification and constant fidelity to God’s design.
Teach us, Immaculate Mother, to love that hidden life of Nazareth;
to discover the greatness of the small,
the fruitfulness of silent sacrifice
and the peace that is born of living entirely for God.
Oh, Mary, how much Joseph loved you and how his heart rejoiced in serving you;
That is why today, with humble delicacy, he leads us to You.
Because Joseph’s heart, so strong and so noble,
knows that no one approaches Jesus with greater security than by your hand.
That is why we come to You today with filial confidence:
teach us to go to Joseph with love;
make us learn to take refuge under his patronage,
to trust in his powerful intercession and to imitate the fidelity of his life.
What sweet contention!:
Joseph, with elegant chivalry, leads us toward You;
You, with spousal wisdom, lead us to Joseph;
and both, with the tenderness of parents, always place us with Jesus.
That, taken by your united hands,
we learn to love the Lord more and more
and to desire with all our soul that his reign extend in the world.
Make, Mary, the Heart of your Son reign in our lives,
in our families and in the entire Church.
And that, sustained by your maternal love and by the protection of the glorious Saint Joseph, we live always in the fidelity of Nazareth,
until the day when we can contemplate Jesus forever in the glory of heaven.
Amen.