Happy St. Joseph's Day!

An obvious topic for today's Lenten reflection would be the obedience and faith of St. Joseph. Imagine you're Joe: your fiancee turns up with a bun in the oven that you KNOW isn't yours, and she swears she hasn't been messing around. But then you dream that she's right, the child is God Incarnate, so you go ahead and marry her. There are a couple of weird things going on the night the kid is born, like a big star resting right over the stable and shepards saying they heard angels singing, and sometime later a bunch of fancy dudes on camels come to your door with lots of schwag. THEN you dream that you have to take your wife and kid out of the country because the local honcho wants to knock the kid off. (Good thing those Eastern dudes brought you all that schwag to sell to finance a trip all the way to Egypt!) Wouldn't you be just a little weirded out? But St. Joseph stays calm through it all and does what he is told, no matter how out there it seems, and in the end the little nuclear family got to move to a nice place in Nazareth.

Today you were supposed to wear red in honor of St. Joseph. Did you? (I'll wait while you check.) He is the patron saint of Italy, Poland, and I think maybe Germany too. On St. Joseph's Day, everyone is a little bit Italian! I said to Richard Bonomo that it was a shame this day didn't get the same press as St. Patrick's Day, wouldn't he love to have his ethnic background commercialized and trivialized like mine has been? and oddly enough he said No. But I have figured out the basic problem: the Italians need a simple, attractive emblem like the shamrock. Why shouldn't people with Italian surnames get catalogues full of Italocrap just like the catalogues I keep getting full of Celtocrap? How did they know I needed a toilet seat cover emblazoned with shamrocks and a green scarf that says "Irish Princess" and a plastic angel that plays "Tura Lura"? So I am asking you, my faithful readers, to suggest a simple, bold, and monochromatic emblem for the Italians to rival the shamrocks of the Irish. Maybe a meatball would be good...? It's a simple geometric shape and a bright red color!

St. Joseph is also the patron saint of workers because of his work as a carpenter, and the protector of virgins because of his role as Our Lady's protector. I'm not sure why people bury statues of him upside-down in the yard to sell their houses; they tell me it works, but it seems a little idol-worshipy to me, not to mention disrespectful. Then again, I suppose it's no worse than hanging a statue of St. Anthony upside-down until he finds you a husband. Why would St. Anthony find you a husband? I thought St. Anne (Our Lady's mother) was the patron saint of single woman. I always heard you were supposed to pray to her: "Dear St. Anne/Find me a man!" St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. ("Tony, Tony, come around/Something's lost and must be found!") But maybe I should be praying to St. Anthony, because my man is clearly lost, since he hasn't found me yet!

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