While it is a feast day that calls to mind the foster father of Jesus, your friend and mine, the husband of Mary, what also caught my attention somehow or other related to the vine and the branches gospel, is the reality that it is May 1st. Already 4 months of this year have passed. Wow!
I began to question my spiritual journey thus far in the year. How strong am I in my being attached to God, to Jesus? This has brought me to consider how closely Jesus and Joseph must have been to each other. For thirty years Jesus knew one man as an earthly father. Day after day, especially in the place where Joseph plied his trade as a carpenter with Jesus learning from him. Imagine all of the various items that Jesus must have made during those years. Consider what price a table would bring if it had survived all these years with the awareness that it was Jesus made.
Again the vine and branches story calls each of us to look at the relationship we can have with God if we but give some time each day to be with him, just as Jesus was with Joseph.
Keep it short, I hear often when speaking about homilies or sermons. Myself the son of an excellent cabinet maker, I learned from my father and my grandfather to be careful in using God's gifts ... namely the good wood that would be used for exquisite cabinetry. Good wood is expensive ... more so today than fifty years ago when I worked each summer in the shop. But no cabinet was as good as the labor that made the item "shine."
So, too, in our relationship with God. Get to the point. Use the best of who you are and the skills that God gave you to be what he wants you to be. Every day use the very best to make your life as one of God's chosen ones: prayer, reading sacred scripture, participating in the Eucharist. These are the tools and the wood that you and I can use to create what God has been willing to give to us. Be a St. Joseph. Let your work bring praise to the Creator God.
