The Eve of the Equinox: The Feast of Saint Joseph

Before addressing the Festival of the Event called the Annunciation, we need to address the often forgettable Feast of Saint Joseph occurring two days after Saint Patrick’s Day. It is, in the eyes of the Churches, a much more important day than the one two days earlier, a great feast that has been eclipsed by Patrick.

            Joseph suffers the fate of being a saint who is, technically, very important but also stripped of the charisma other, arguably lesser, saint possess. There are certainly some who have been incredibly dedicated to him. I live in a county in northern Indiana with his name, by a river with his name, in the shadow of a tripartite religious congregation dedicated to him. But in the end even that congregation named their two colleges around here Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s, after his wife, and the name of St. Joseph slides so blandly off the tongue that despite the two churches, their accompanying schools, the high school, the river, the county we live in, the largest hospital in the area all bearing his name, still, no one thinks of him.

            Joseph is, like it or not, a placeholder. Popes stick him in the place of other things and this is why he is important. The patron Saint of Workers, to balance against the communist Day of the Worker, he was given another Feast Day, May the First, and for any witch, this is noteworthy. May is the Month given to Mary, the Goddess as Virgin and Mother simultaneously. More on this later. The first day of that month is hers, but it is called for Joseph the Worker. In Orthodoxy and Catholicism, the first Sunday after Christmas is either his day or the day focused on him, a strange focus since neither in conception nor actual labor did he have anything to do with Christ.  And now, on the Eve of the Equinox, the day is his as well.

Joseph has always been problematic in Christianity. The Gospels list he and Mary as having several children. Both the Orthodox and the Catholics, at great pains to swear upon an eternal (and unnecessary) virginity for the Mother of God, took care to portray these other progeny of Joseph and Mary as either being Jesus’s cousins, or his older siblings from Joseph’s first marriage instead of the younger brothers and sisters they so clearly are. In addition, to make the idea of Joseph EVER having sex with his wife more unbelievable, Joseph was portrayed as impossibly old. A foster father of Jesus who is too young, too attractive, too charismatic is also too sexual. Up until Protestantism, which is far from the iconographic and resists the magical, Joseph had to be… unfuckable. So Joseph is wrapped in a silence which is more bland than mysterious. But what if we restore to Joseph his sexuality and his youth, his vitality and his power? Some Catholic portraits to this? What does it say of his relationship to his wife, and his relationship to God, and Jesus? Can it be that the mystery of Joseph is that he is a male face for Mary who herself is the Divine Woman as Mother and Virgin? The Goddess and the God always travel together. To be fully divine one must encompass the male and the female. Is Joseph, then, quite possibly, the Divine Man, the Virgin Father, the Shadow of the Father God, the Other Side of the Lady? Are all of his days shadows on which we could begin to look past the shallow theology and the vapid icons which tell us so little? When the sexuality of Joseph is restored, perhaps many other things will be restored. Perhaps we will look again at how one becomes the Son of God, how the Spirit conceives and what it means to be a Virgin, but these are weighty opening questions to entirely new mysteries.