Radio Mater broadcast hosted by Don Mario Carrera, every 1st Wednesday of the month
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Dear and beloved Saint Joseph, last Sunday's Roman rite liturgy echoed in our assemblies the words of your son Jesus, who invited us to keep vigil, but also offered us reasons to be attentive and vigilant to the signs of God's presence in our life. The presence of the divine is a variegated presence similar to a diamond reflection. At every angle of light it gives a reflection of different colour.
This comparison of the reflection of the diamond also applies to the reflection of the eyes of every person we meet.
Looking into a person's eyes, we see a glimmer of emotions that reflect joy, suffering, shyness, complacency, sympathy or aversion. Eyes free from prejudice, when they look at a person with love, are able to see, to discover wonders invisible to the eyes of those who look without love or with indifference. All God's messages reach Saint Joseph at night, in that space of time in which Jesus invites us to be vigilant. In the Roman rite we heard it in last Sunday's Gospel: we need to be vigilant at sunset, at midnight, at the crowing of the cock and at the first flashes of dawn.
Jesus' invitation to vigilance is about the hours of the night. We must be vigilant because the vote of faith is a constant conquest and we must defend it from robbers who would like to steal the light of hope from us.
If we look at the life of Saint Joseph and his wife Mary, it is a life filled with invitations and attentions. God tells Joseph to take Mary as his bride, to leave for Bethlehem for the census, to flee to Egypt. Returning from Egypt. Joseph always obeyed God's invitation with generosity, he always cast the anchor of hope in the future and you experienced that the future was full of grace, full of God.
In these weeks of Advent, which we are experiencing, Saint Joseph invites us to live it as he lived it.
Advent is the time that prepares for births, it is the time in which Joseph's wife was waiting for birth.
Waiting is the time of mothers: only pregnant women and expectant mothers know what waiting really means.
Today we are here reflecting, praying and asking ourselves: what are we really waiting for?
The pages of the Gospel take us by the hand and introduce us beyond the threshold of the door of faith and help us to look up, to perceive the world pulsating around us, to feel part of an immense life and bearer of the gift of faith to help our people believe.
Saint Joseph, from a faith point of view, lived a singular event: he was called to represent, from a legal point of view, God the Father and to be next to Jesus as an incarnate reflection in daily life of the excellent qualities of God, because Jesus saw in him the requirements of a successful life lived in a superlative way.
This singularity is true, however Saint Joseph had the support of a family and social framework very marked by a vital relationship with God: God truly was at the center of the life of Joseph, of the people and of the individuals belonging to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob .
Dear and beloved Saint Joseph, We are living in a season, a time of crisis. There is a crisis in the Church of your son Jesus and of which you are the universal protector.
Last Sunday we began a year dedicated to prayer and reflection on the life of consecrated people, but we live in a period of history in which vocations are decreasing, religious indifference is growing, and the ecclesiastical institution is losing trust. The saints who still exist seem unable to purify the sewage of this humanity of ours. We live in a time of radical transformations, of transition, of epochal transitions and on the way towards a future that still has no name.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said:
"Yesterday atheism was in the minds of some philosophers, today we have atheism at home: in our children, cousins, grandchildren and neighbors." Unfortunately we must say that atheism today involves everyone and we have lowered the vigilance suggested by Jesus and we too are learning to live as if God did not exist. It is a sort of atheism due to the omission of our faith.
But it is faith itself, supported by hope that does not disappoint, which allows us to glimpse through our personal life, our daily history, to feel the very breath of God who "shapes our heart and transforms it with divine grace" .
The faith that shapes our heart and allows us to collaborate in building the kingdom of God which is justice, peace, brotherhood, esteem, trust.
If God loses the center of our life, man loses his right place, his position in creation, the ability to fulfill himself with others.
Like the sailor who gazes at the Polar Star, each of us becomes a "beggar for God" and carries a mysterious desire for God in our soul.
We look to Saint Joseph who set out on a journey to arrive in the territory of the House of Judah, to be registered, trusting in the responsibility of being the patron saint of the universal Church, we rely on his intercession to help us experience this advent, without losing our way right that leads to Bethlehem and thus, like the shepherds, we are able to recognize Jesus, the Son of God born under the tutelage of Saint Joseph and his sweet wife, Mary.
To do this it is necessary that his intercession gives us energy and helps us to promote within ourselves a sort of pedagogy of desire, of careful vigilance that allows us to savor the flavor of the authentic joys of life.
In this moment of introduction to this hour of spirituality, oh esteemed and venerated Saint Joseph, protector of workers, we also want to put before you the discomfort of the economic and financial crisis from which we are suffering, you who have experienced the hard job of live with the sweat of our brow, help us to seize this crisis as an opportunity that suggests that we must change path and favor other economic models, not based on the logic of infinite growth, which is unsustainable, but on respect for nature, sobriety and solidarity.
For the economy everything is in motion, everything is subjected to continuous economic maneuvers and we can truly say that "everything is in motion and life is on pause".
Saint Joseph, we beg you, we need a leap in faith that helps us to be able to read the Gospel with confident openness which helps us to read the present and history as the womb of the future, a future full of meaning and not to stop at today , but to look ahead.
Saint Joseph with Mary you ferried human history, the world, from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Your world, oh dear Saint Joseph, carried another world: that of Jesus Christ. Which is a better and more just world, where God comes, close as breathing, close as the heart, close as life and holds us by the hand to accompany us on the ever new paths of life.