Labor Day: St. Joseph the Worker

Is this not the carpenter’s son?  This question seems to be more than a little dismissive.  The speaker is unwilling to name personally the person he wants to discount, even thought they can tick off the names of most other persons in that family.  He is nothing but the carpenter’s son.  He is dumped into the cloud of anonymity and impersonality.  His worth and value will depend on what he can produce, not on who he is.  And that value will be assessed in terms of what the market offers, what its commercial worth is.  What can you get for it?  That we can afford to take offense is already a mark of our superiority, that we control the market.

The vulnerability of the workers is only heightened in our culture which is happy to efface their role.  The use of technology is meant to extend the functions of human abilities.  Even a hammer is a form of technology.  But the increasing use of it has begun to detach the human from the effects desired.  The extension has made it more difficult to regulate and connect with human needs and human agents.  The worker disappears.  Martin Buber once wrote a book called The Eclipse of God.  We are now seeing the eclipse of the human.  Perhaps the eclipses are related.  We have become numb to a sense of personal presence being invested or even involved in the products we consume.  We control the market and decide what is worthwhile.  The scientific/technocratic paradigm (underlined by Pope Francis) has become the dominating model for the way we understand life in the world.

Recalling the witness of St. Joseph is more than a bit of holy nostalgia.  When we remember his life, we open the door to an experience of total integrity (justice) which lived in trusting consciousness of what God asked of him.  His consciousness and self-presence connected him with the reality of the needs of others and of the call of God in his life, the Holy.  He was a steward of the gifts of creation given by God, at the service of God’s plan being worked out in the lives of Jesus and Mary.  The gifts he was given were transformed into gifts which he gave.  The receiving and giving transformed and changed his life.

 Blessed are you Lord God of all creation.  Through your goodness we have received the gifts we offer you.  Fruit of the earth and work of human hands.  They will become for us the bread of life. 

A growing consciousness and self-presence in the midst of our work unveil the depths it contains, the connectedness and integrity that grow in the silent attention and bears fruit in the care for others and stewardship of the earth. Our work is a eucharist.  That in all things God may be glorified (l Peter 4:11).