It was St. Joseph’s privilege and burden to live intimately with the woman who was closer to God than any other human being. Mary was called to sacrifice her life, emptying and opening her self, so that God could fill her; Joseph was called to sacrifice his life so that God could fill Mary.  Joseph’s vocation called him very near to the relationship between God and Mary; and it called him to sacrifice himself for that relationship, which he could never enter or begin to understand. 

And so St. Mary is the model for Christian contemplatives; but St. Joseph shows us how to live in a contemplative community.

This vocation defines us by our relationship with God alone; and asks us to enter that relationship through a life shared with others – who are defined only by their own exclusive relationship with God.  Ritual, respect, and distance provide the community’s structure, and the structure’s supporting tension comes from holding so closely together these all-consuming and entirely individual concentrations on God. 

So our life calls us to both Mary and Joseph’s roles in turn; we know God in our private experience of Him, and in encountering His dealings with others, from which we are completely excluded. And in both roles we are called to sacrifice ourselves, for without this we cannot love. 

Like Joseph, we find ourselves asked to give without measure for the sake of relationships we will never enter. The wall between us here is so impenetrable that in this lifetime we will often never know if a sacrifice was noticed; much less can we judge whether it was justified. This wall totally blocked Joseph from God’s relationship with Mary; yet as an outsider he was perhaps better placed to see its visible results. He could see Mary’s self-emptying bringing her fulfillment: the joy, the pain, and peace of her growing intimacy with Jesus.  His own relationship with God was command and silent obedience, given him not to enrich his experience but Mary’s, and the rest of humanity. Joseph could see only the shadows around the edge of the Annunciation, and yet, for him, that was enough for a lifetime of blind faith that would end still unconfirmed. 

St. Paul reminds us that such faith can only come after we have died to the law.  If we live by a law, we live as the guardians of an ideal that will disappear from the world if we fail to express it.  But “where there is no law, neither is there violation.”  This does not mean our life has no possible wrong turnings.  Rather, we live not for an ideal but for a Person, living with and in Him, and ultimately living only by the faith we have in Him “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” 

It is this faith, and Christ himself, who gives us Joseph’s freedom to obey, to toss away our comfort, our survival, even our experience of God, without a second glance; confident beyond reason that the unknowable mystery of God’s will is what we truly want.