To be a Father with Saint Joseph

By Fabrice Hadjadj

Exploring Scripture and Tradition in his energetic and poetic style, Hadjadj offers a fresh and beautiful meditation on Saint Joseph, his life with Jesus and Mary, and his exceptional fatherhood.

In twelve profound and often humorous chapters, Hadjadj offers, through the extraordinary example of Saint Joseph, a remarkable reflection on essential values that today's world too often rejects: prayer, love, married life, education, fatherhood and manliness, chastity, faith in God, the beauty of human work, and the dignity of death.

"Fabrice Hadjadj is one of the finest Catholic minds in decades."
— Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949239850

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

One might think parents are some of the most dangerous people. That’s commonly thought among child-free proponents or members of One Planet, one Child. According to them, we have an overly short-term view. Under cover of welcoming life, we are its destroyers. To us, our bunch of kids seems like an incarnate ode to the exuberance of nature. To them, they’re a horde pillaging the earth. Their mischief-making will end in forcing mankind to move to Mars. We’d do better to prevent their birth… for the sake of future generations. Why engender more little mortals, especially in our post-modern times when the extinction of mankind is guaranteed and it would just be easier to buy a smartphone or get a guinea pig?

The age-old concern of posterity held sway until, not so long ago, it was superseded by modern concepts of progress which spurred us on. That’s no longer the case: no one worries any more about perpetuating a lineage, and rare are those who believe in the benevolent dictatorship of the proletariat. What remains then to motivate the grave act of procreation?

As a philosopher, and even more so as a Jew, to the question, Why have children? I tend to reply, So that there may still be people asking: Why? Indeed, without children, or the desire to welcome them, would we even worry about the future to the point of calling upon the heavens? And what would become of the see-saws and the swings? Or the paper airplanes? Neither gravity nor lightness would have any more meaning.

If you are like Job, the father of seven sons and three daughters, you can authentically cry out: Perish the day on which I was born! (Jb 3:3). And when you’ve got a little three-year-old on your hands, it’s undeniably legitimate to play horsey, bouncing them on your knee in the middle of a conference. Only children profoundly call us to the simple joys of life, as well as to the great anguish of death.

However, the questioning doesn’t stop there. What I have just observed concerns the mother as much as the father. With particular regard to the latter—and thus to me—the charge sheet is more lengthy. Isn’t arrogant to give life and set oneself up as its guardian when we haven’t a received a proper diploma to do so? Do I fully realize what fatherhood is? Am I able to cast my child out into this world with every guarantee of success, with perfect mastery of the situation? No, I am not. None of us is ever ready to become a father. It just falls to our shoulders.

And yet, perhaps it’s not about being ready, like training for a competition. Perhaps it’s about recognizing that, above all, it’s beyond us, like a prayer of praise. Perhaps paternity is like birth: it simply falls to us, with us and despite us, against all the odds—unjustifiably, par excellence, because it is what justifies everything else. Perhaps it’s not the result of a calculation, but the source of freedom. In short, that it’s life itself. Whoever said life should have a manual? A father isn’t an expert. He’s just following as best he can the adventure of his fathers. He takes part in what is the most incomprehensible and most exhilarating adventure of all. It’s here that Joseph of Nazareth enters the scene. At the start of this little book, I can only ask that he pray for us to the eternal Father who makes all things possible. He alone reveals to us the richness of fatherhood, always disconcerting, always disconcerted, and thus divinely fruitful.

My thesis is that no one was more radically a father than Joseph. By this, I remain faithful to the Virgin Mary. It is she who, on finding Jesus in the Temple, speaks to him of Joseph as your father (Lk 2:48). And I’m also faithful to the name of Joseph. In Hebrew, his name, meaning he will multiply, he will make grow, refers to fatherly fecundity and authority. Finally, I am faithful to a typical biblical story in which a promised paternity, through divine intervention, follows a time of barrenness: the Lord visited Sarah; as he had said, and does for her what he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son (Gn 21:1-2).

In this case, can one only speak of legal paternity—paternity of a child recognized in the civil registry? I don’t wish to diminish the role of adoption. Among the Romans, it was the expression of a free man’s power to exercise his will. Generally, a Roman would adopt an adult, in the knowledge of what he was taking on (you never know what kind of rascal a child could turn into). A son thus adopted, picked out, selected, had more rights than a natural son. Since biological paternity has nothing specifically human about it, since we share that with other male animals, this paternity by adoption was of the highest form. It was a matter of personal choice and had legal validity.

This however was not the case in biblical thought. To view Joseph as an adoptive father, according to the Roman custom, is as absurd as viewing Mary as a surrogate mother, according to contemporary custom—as generously as we may view either of their intentions. It was not the simple will of Joseph or of human tribunals that, in essence, established his fatherhood: it was the divine will.

The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus (Mt 1:20-21). The Messiah comes entirely through the Holy Spirit. Yes, he is born of the Virgin Mary, but to enter humanity presupposes a father and a mother, the result of the flesh and the word… To satisfy those who rely on genetics, we must ask the question: where did Jesus get his Y chromosome? The Holy Spirit doesn’t have any DNA. In this miraculous conception, God could very well have formed Jesus with the addition of gametes from Mary and from her spouse, without sexual union. But reducing paternity to a simple question of genetics is to miss the essential.

If Jesus takes the flesh of Mary, he takes the name of Joseph. In the biblical world, the name is fundamental. The incarnation of the Word is also to enter his name into a genealogy, and that genealogy which opens the New Testament, that of the carpenter, the descendant of David, of Judah and of Abraham, is not a lie. Both incarnation and naming form the entrance of the son of Man into human reality.

We are faced here with a miraculous event which has no equivalent elsewhere. This is why our concepts tend to reduce this conception to something identifiable. This might lead us to think that God acts on the same level as us, and that we have a competitive relationship with him: the more divine he is, the less human we are. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every miracle that comes from the One who created the ordinary course of things is not there to turn us toward the extraordinary, but to bring us back with wonder to the ordinary. When the man born blind begins to see again, it is sight, common to all men, that suddenly appears as a prodigious gift. In the same way, when the Virgin gives birth and a carpenter becomes a father through non-biological means, it is the ordinary maternity and paternity that reveals its wondrousness.

To put it succinctly, we are fathers through the force of nature, while Joseph is a father through the Creator of the force of nature. Light is no less bright if it comes directly from the sun or is reflected by the moon. A river is no less pure whether it flows from the source or from streams. In this, Joseph’s paternity is more radical than our own. It is more directly linked to that of the Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name in heaven and on earth (Eph 3:14-15).

Cross-referencing the first births in Genesis with those in the genealogy that opens the New Testament (Mt 1:1) is quite revealing. One has only to compare, in their respective wording, the births at the beginning of humanity with that of the Nativity of the Son of Man: Adam had relations with his wife; she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have produced a man with the help of the Lord (Gn 4:1). That was the first birth. But the race of Cain was totally submerged in the Flood. The human multitude finds its descent through Noah, the descendant of another of Eve’s sons—a new start: Adam again had relations with his wife, and she gave birth to a son whom she called Seth. For "God has granted me more