Revisiting the Past

Last weekend, I attended the Easter Vigil Mass at a nearby Monastery. I hadn’t been there in a while. Back in the years 1999 and 2000, I spent a lot of time at the place. The Chapel, a small, but elegant little structure, with tall ceilings, is situated next the main building. The whole compound is secluded on the hillside adjacent to an expansive stretch of vineyards. Sounds, of the nearby roads, were distant and muffled. I mostly remember just hearing the occasional bumble-bee circling above a large window overhead, or the rush of some leaves on a trees outside when the breeze began to blow. Once the noonday sun would begin to heat the Chapel's roof, the room echoed with the creaking of the wood banisters on the ceiling expanding from the warmth. Rarely, if ever, did anyone walk in. For a few months, it was a sort-of private oasis away from the endlessly-pressing evil of the world. For, I had just escaped the opening-jaws of death and an immediate plunge into the darkness of hell.

When I started visiting this Chapel, I was new to the whole God and Jesus “thing.” I didn’t know what to do or how to pray. At first, I simply sat in one of the chairs, dumfounded and desperate, and looked around. One thing, that straightaway caught my attention, was a large almost life-size statue of St. Joseph holding the baby Jesus. I knew what the statue represented, but that's about it. I kept looking at it. Something drew me there. Was it the image of the Father and Son? Because, I had seen many such images, since returning to the Church, of Our Lady and the infant Jesus, but none of Jesus with His Foster-Father. Did they hold the key? Then, I began to think about Joseph a lot; in a Scriptural sense: what he was like, what he did, how he related to Jesus and Mary. Somehow, I started to pray for Joseph's help. I don’t know why I did this. But, I think it all had to do with the original wound in my heart: that of pornography and how it misplaced and nearly destroyed my sense of masculinity. Joseph, for the first time, showed me what it was to be a man. And, I began to heal.