St. Joseph, husband of Mary

What a privileged exposure to sanctity was given to St. Joseph. To live night and day with both Christ and Our Lady was for him to be thrown right into the fire of holiness. Yet we ourselves are not robbed of such an exposure for as often as we want we can come and visit Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament. Whereas St. Joseph could hold Him in his arms we can hold him in our souls through the Eucharist.

A) From St. Joseph we learn at least two lessons about our vocations.
1: The central calling of each person is love. St. Joseph no doubt would have been confronted with the temptation in the midst of his vocation to become overcome with his own inadequacies as he taught and raised the Christ child who in one real sense was in need of no one's teaching. “Is it not I who should be taught by you.” But rather the confidence that God the Father placed in the care of the frail St. Joseph by entrusting his eternal Son into his hands gave rise to a deep sense of the merciful love that God had for him.
2: We can trust in the overall plan and wisdom of God for He provides His grace in the face of our weaknesses and perceived weaknesses. If God calls us to do something, we must trust that we are with His grace capable of faithfully living it out with love, for to believe the contrary would be to accuse God of being imprudent, in other words, that God made a decision that was incorrect in a particular situation which we know would be a false statement because God and imprudence are not buddies since God is all knowing.

B) From St. Joseph we learn a lesson about the spiritual fruitfulness of celibacy; for celibacy is a marvelous expression of sexuality rather then being a denial of it as is sometimes thought by members of our society and even among some members of our holy Catholic faith.
1: All will love as celibates in the kingdom. Those who express their sexuality in this life are signs to this world of the deep hunger of the heart which is holding out for the ultimate consummation of love that will happen at the wedding feast of the Lamb.
2: Celibacy is about learning to love eternity one hour at a time. Celibacy offers the person who accepts it the opportunity to love what is eternally enduring in others and thereby the opportunity to overcome the temptation to reduce others to that which with is simply physical.
St. Joseph was the first to venerate the Tabernacle of our Lord by offering Mary his love in a celibate manner which respected her virginal purity, a purity which St. Joseph lovingly acknowledged as being Mary's gift to the world, a gift at whose service St. Joseph lived for he saw in Mary's virginal purity the ultimate expression of sexual fruitfulness, the Christ child who is the fruit of her womb and the fruit of the vine from which our deepest thirsts are quenched with all things Divine.