Portfolio > JML - PLOGS (2014-2023)

2019

Joseph The Carpenter
Oil on canvas, Georges de La Tour, 1642
Painting located in the Louvre, Paris, France
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_the_Carp…

PLOGS BELOW (JML's Poetic Commentary)

About Jesus’s legal father

There is a meme circulating that reads, “some of you have never held a flashlight for your dad and had him yell at you for not shining it in the right place and it really shows.” For the sake of illustrating some quality fatherly love, I chose the painting, “Joseph the Carpenter.” It’s presumed that the candle Jesus is holding symbolizes that He is “the light of the world.”

On a personal level of trying to make sense of God being the father of Jesus and Joseph being Jesus’ legal father, I imagine that God assigned Jesus a dad to teach Jesus to be fully human and to be the provider for The Holy Family. In modern statistical writings on “fatherless children,” children who grow up without a father in the household are more likely in live in poverty, be incarcerated, and suffer from addiction to drugs or alcohol. And here we have, Jesus, Son of God fathered by Joseph on Earth, that prefers poverty, turns water into wine, and is incarcerated and ultimately crucified. So, in my modern personal questions of why God would assign Jesus a father on Earth, I am able to find a bit of compassion for every family situation that exists. Nobody needs to feel inferior that their father is “unavailable” or a “dead beat dad” or a “deceased parent,” because while father’s are part of the life/family/existence phenomenon— ultimately God is the one who is still in control.

Joseph is the legal father of Jesus and he is an obedient servant of God. Fathers and Mothers are both represented as obedient servants of God in Jesus’s family dynamic. When you look at the Holy Family, Mary was asked by Archangel Gabriel to be Jesus’s Mother. Joseph, was also asked by an angel to be Jesus’s Father. And I’m not saying that you are entitled to disobey your legal, biological parents, but you are obligated to be obedient to God.

Happy celebration of Saint Joseph, legal father of Jesus.

XOXO! JML

In honor of Saint Joseph
Celebrated on the first Sunday
after Christmas.

Saint Joseph
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Joseph

ADVENT DAILY REFLECTIONS
www.ptstulsa.edu/wp-content/uploads/201…

The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day
(audiobook) youtu.be/mTtMj9INlnE

THE INTERIOR CASTLE
Saint Theresa of Avila

PDF
www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1515…

AUDIO
m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL42528F62F…

THE SECOND SEX
Simone de Beauvoir

eBook
uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1…

Death Comes For The Archbishop
Willa Crather

eBook
ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/cather/willa/d…