The following is an excerpt from St. Joseph and His World by Mike Aquilina.
Modern readers have a tendency to reduce the lives of biblical figures to the scenes that are preserved in Scripture. If we do this with Joseph, however, and we reduce him to just those few scenes with angels, we might conclude that he was indeed an unusual man. We might think his life was like an action movie, but with even less talk and more special effects. He was always, it seems, in the midst of danger, or high drama, or distant travel, or deep adventure.
And those wild episodes were surely definitive for his life. Nevertheless, they probably occupied just a few days in total. And he was married for thousands of days.
Unfortunately, the Gospels don’t give any close-ups of his ordinary days. Tradition refers to those days as the “hidden life” of the Holy Family.
Yet the Gospels don’t leave posterity entirely in the dark. What the Evangelists reveal is that Joseph’s reputation did not rest on his adventures. So, apparently, he did not talk much about them.
When his neighbors thought about him at all, they referred to him simply as “the carpenter”—not the man who traveled to Egypt—not the man who was visited by Persian Magi—not the mortal enemy of the loathsome Herod. He was simply “the carpenter”; and Jesus was simply the carpenter’s son.
He was known for his work, and his work was not biblical interpretation, or preaching, or teaching, or philosophy, or theology. He wasn’t a thinker like Philo of Alexandria. He wasn’t a priest like Mary’s kinsman Zechariah.
Though God had chosen Joseph for the greatest mission ever, he was an ordinary workingman. And this is a supremely important fact: he was no less ordinary for the fact that he was close to the angels.
Why is this fact so important? Because in the midst of every believer’s daily work, the angels are there; God wants everyone to be close to the angels, attentive to the angels, and alert to their promptings. This is not a gift or a skill for unusual people. This is for everyone, as it was for Joseph.
What was his work like in the day-to-day?
From childhood onward, Joseph probably worked with crews of men. They commuted together to sites by walking, perhaps for miles. Their work was demanding on both muscle and mind. Their worksites were noisy with the sound of hammers and saws and voices. Many of Joseph’s co-workers were probably rough and uncouth.
Yet in the midst of all that racket Joseph cultivated interior silence and the habit of prayer.
