Thought for the Day – 2 March – Meditations with Fr Richard Frederick Clarke SJ (1839-1900)
“Short Meditations for March, St Joseph”
From “The Devout Year”
By Fr Richard Frederick Clarke SJ (1839-1900)
2nd Day – St Joseph’s Parentage and Birth
+1. Although St Joseph lived in poverty and contempt, he came of a noble ancestry. The blood of Kings and Saints ran in his veins and, what is more, he inherited, from them, the virtues of each but in a far higher degree, than that which their original possessor had enjoyed.
How much the good in me is an inheritance from my parents and forefathers!? Yet how ill I have employed the virtues I received from them! Instead of being better than they, like St Joseph, I am the degenerate child of parents far better than myself.
+2. St Joseph, as the greatest of all the Saints next to Our Lady, had all the privileges of other Saints.
Hence, we may piously believe that, like St John, he was cleansed from sin in his mother’s womb.
He was to be Mary’s spouse, he was to occupy the first and foremost place in the family of Jesus, he was, hereafter, to be the Patron of the whole Church! It was, therefore, fitting that he should be endowed with this initial privilege of being, from his birth, a child of God, an heir of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Thank God for this privilege bestowed on him!
+3. St Joseph was the connecting link between the Old and the New Dispensation, the first dawn which announces the coming day.
In his youth, he belonged to the Old Law, in his later life, to the New. As the dawn brightens into the glorious day, so St Joseph’s life, beautiful from the first, advanced in splendour continually.
Is this the history of my life? Have I made steady progress
in the love of God?
AnaStpaul 