 Hi, I'm Tim Hill with tan books and tan headquarters, Gastonia, North Carolina. We'd like to welcome everyone into our tan round table about Saint Joseph and what better way to discuss Saint Joseph than with really well qualified authors about books on Saint Joseph. Three of them joining me now. I really appreciate all you guys time today. Devin Schatt joining us from Iowa, Father Matthew Kowth from not too far down the road in Charlotte, North Carolina and Father Sebastian Walsh as well. We really appreciate you guys being here with us. I will do my best to stay out of your way as you guys impart a lot of information and education to everyone joining us here and we're certainly happy to have you feel free to comment in by the way if you're joining us and we'll try to get some questions and comments in on our round table today that should be about 45 minutes or an hour or so. Why don't we start since Saint Joseph of course is our our spiritual father a lot of what we discuss here today I think will be information questions about maybe what we can glean from Saint Joseph the lessons of his life and how he can help us grow spiritually but why don't we start if you guys don't mind with how you came to know about the concept of fatherhood to begin with to be at the very beginning of your own lives if you don't mind a kind of a base point for us Father Kowth if you could why don't you lead us off? Sure it's great to be here one of the difficulties of course of becoming a priest and I went into the seminary right out of high school is that when you're a natural father you don't really have a choice with how you're gonna be a dad because at some point you have a child that needs to be taken care of whereas when you're in the seminary you prepare for a long time thinking in some ways theoretically about about fatherhood and then you end up having to sort of not viscerally from the ground up but in some ways from the top down begin to apply the things that you studied and so in part both the reason for beginning a seminary here in Charlotte but also this consideration of fatherhood relative to the priesthood was because I found myself as a young man having been bereft of what I considered to be my rightful inheritance and so the first experience of fatherhood in some sense was an absence of a fatherhood relative to inheritance that I didn't receive and when I say that I mean specifically about the faith I went to 12 years of Catholic school and I didn't know the first thing about the faith and so when I began to learn about it having gone to seminary I remember having a bit of a visceral strong perhaps even angry reaction in terms of the injustice about the fact that I should have been told this and I I'm not saying that I would have saved myself a lot of pain and agony and sin but I might have been better I was and not having received it so there was a sense that something had been kept from me and that I should have been given this inheritance as a as a son of the church and my father's in some sense didn't do that I don't mean simply my dad but I mean in terms of my education and in terms of the priest that that I grew up knowing and many of whom were wonderful men but it was that awful time to some degree and confusion in the church in which everything was up for grabs and the church's own deposit of faith wasn't something that they valued sufficiently to think that they needed to pass it on so that's a huge part of my own formation in my own life in the desire to make sure that the men under our watch received their rightful inheritance which is an essential part of fatherhood to give over that which you have yourself received. Well I appreciate your transparency with us in your personal background Father Sebastian what about you how you first learned about fatherhood? Well obviously I learned about it from my own dad and you know I wasn't even raised Catholic at the beginning I became a Catholic I'm a convert when I was in my early teens but my father he was not he was raised Catholic himself but he wasn't practicing but he was a really good father from the standpoint he's very affectionate very loving you know always affirming always encouraging things like that you know he's very good in all those areas that I really appreciate it and it's interesting because my father he he had to deal with a lot of different things from his own upbringing my grandfather being from Ireland was not surprisingly given too much to drink some alcohol when he would drink too much it was really hard on my dad you know physically abusive and things like that and and so my poor dad grew up with a lot of feelings of by you know insufficiency he felt really you know never good enough and it's interesting because you know he he knew enough to realize I can't do that to my own kids and so he kind of took the opposite tact where he was trying to be really affirming really helpful really loving really affectionate and the interesting thing was he did all of that well he himself didn't feel affirmed you know and so I always appreciate that my dad did little things like for example when he was a teenager he made a vow that he would never drink alcohol his whole life because he saw how destroyed his own family and just by doing that he saved so much you know pain and suffering from our family but nonetheless he had his faults he had his defects and even that was part of God's plan to you know for us to realize that none of us has a perfect human father God's intention is actually that we eventually look past our human father to look to God the father you know for everything that we really need but I got a lot from my dad with regard to just this sense of self-sacrifice a sense of how to really communicate to a child that you're the object of love and it's good that you exist you know I was very appreciative for those good things my dad could give me and some other things that he couldn't give me I was able to find another family's I had some really good Catholic families I met growing up later on they were able to kind of supplement for lack of a better word some of the things that my dad just couldn't hand on because he never got himself really appreciate you giving us that background and Devon I don't know about you but I know at least growing up I made the mistake many times and the priests that I came in contact with of seeing them almost as separate like not growing up and having those experiences with their own father in my mind it just didn't it didn't equate to me as I was growing up that oh priests were young boys too and learned lessons about fatherhood of you like me are father biological children so we might have a bit of a different perspective I'm wondering Devon how did you come to to learn about fatherhood to begin with we I mean I did learn about fatherhood from the kind of a temporal biological perspective from my dad I mean my dad was he was into sports so I liked sports and that's how we connected and I really tried to excel at baseball and football to please my dad my dad was a competitor he had a strong will and that was exemplified because he had some addictive qualities and he was an alcoholic or but 1989 when I was in high school he stopped drinking completely and when I saw my dad do that I recognized man this is a man with incredibly strong will he also came into the church when I was in eighth grade however even though I connected with my dad in sports my dad as many of the men of that generation they were workaholics and they believe that being a good father was providing temporarily and so my dad we live in the Chicago land area my dad would leave before the dawn and he would come back after dusk and I would literally I would barely see my father and really it was not my dad's fault it was not my fault but we just grew apart we became distant and so one of the like father Sebastian or I'm sorry like but one of the things that really I guess occurred to me was that I had this void this absence of maybe fatherly affection in the spiritual realm right and so what when this this all came crashing down when my wife was pregnant with our third daughter Anna Marie and then Anna Marie is born at 28 weeks premature so she was extremely small I mean her finger was like the size of my index finger and she spent a month in the neonatal intensive care unit and after they got her lungs developing her digestive system functioning we brought her home and we had our little Anna Marie but then within five days she spiked the fever was having trouble breathing and we whisked her back off to the hospital and but we could not readmitted to the neonatal intensive care unit for fear that we would infect you she would infect the other babies and she had RSV well there was some nurse neglect they weren't prepared to take care of a baby that small and she suffered 10 hours of apnea and then a hypoxic event non-oxygen was transmitted to her brain and as they were rolling my daughter across the tarmac the head nurse said this is our fault we will take we will do whatever we can to remedy the situation and they never say that and so she was flown out to a children's hospital a couple hours away on the way there she had three clinical death experiences and permanent brain injury and now today she's even trapped in her body with a condition of cerebral palsy when I got there that night she was on life support she was an isolation chambered unit and then my wife came the next day because she had to get arrangements for the other two children that we had we have five now and when she saw Anna Marie with the ventilator breathing for and when she saw Anna Marie you know coating out in the doctors defibbing her and resuscitating her she looked at me and she said I need you to come home and be a husband and father and that was that was unsettling to me because I thought I was you know and but what I realized was I was a man of the world even though I had a conversion at 24 this was just several years later even though I thought that I loved Jesus I was a man of the world I was a man who is striving for prestige and prominence and power and pleasure and profit and possessions and all those things that the world promises us and when she said I need you to come home and be a husband and father because I was working around the clock developing news sets for Fox News PBS I was developing sets for PBS I was very busy and I was trying to start my own graphic design business I was a part-time youth minister which as you know means full-time youth ministry and so I was just crazy and my wife was saying you need to stop we need you and in that process I tried to do what she asked I quit youth ministry I quit trying to have my own business and you know tried to be at home more but then what happened is I went through kind of a time of languishing where I was lamenting the fact that I was not out there competing in the world and I think I was going through a pride detox and a friend of mine noticed that I was languishing and he took me on a pilgrimage halfway around the world and it to Medjugorje and I realized it's a very contentious topic and I'm not here to you know either way but what I experienced over there are spiritual leader if you will she was father Yozo's translator and I was talking to her about how I felt like I had something that I needed to do for the Lord or calling on my life but I just couldn't figure that out and she said are you a father and I said yes I'm a father and she's sorry do you have children are you married I said yes and she said go home and be Saint Joseph and you would have thought that that would have been like oh you know okay I'm going to go home be Saint Joseph but all I could picture was you know from the stained glass windows this guy who is bald he looks like he's about 150 he loves lilies and I'm like no thanks you know and but then another thing happened I went to a Dominican friar for confession while there and he said you will become a saint by means of your vocation not outside of it and that really penetrated me because I realize that the path to glory is not by avoiding our vocation as husbands and fathers or priests or sisters but it's by entering into that vocation rather than the world and it was diving into that and going home and asking our lady to show me who this Saint Joseph was that basically I started to learn about this great saint and then I decided I want to not only imitate him but I want to live his spirituality and that was the changing point in my life is when I decided to be like Saint Joseph and then my wife our marriage our family everything changed. Wow powerful stuff for sure Devin thank all three of you guys for sharing your personal I guess perspectives on the beginning of fatherhood and maybe where you are as well the next step for me then is today as we sit here today how do you find how do you define what a good father is and then how does Saint Joseph kind of play into that Father Cal why don't you lead us off again. Oh I'm starting again. That's a great question yeah it's a great question because you know on the one hand I think what we've heard just now is that we've all had aspects of the fatherhood that we have experienced that were good and yet of course as Father Riley said all the fathers that we encounter have clay feet as do we and so manifesting the desire to be like our Heavenly Father at the same time acknowledging that he is the only one from whom all otherhood takes its name so in order to sort of evaluate as it were whether or not I'm I'm being a good father and certainly relative to this imitation of Saint Joseph that we're speaking about currently I would say that the thing that that strikes me the most that I've received from Saint Joseph about fatherhood is is his immediate obedience to God the Father that he simply receives the word from God the Father and he does it he doesn't discuss it he doesn't ask a thousand questions he doesn't hymn and ha he simply like unto Noah himself who was also called a just man when Noah is told to do something that is absolutely preposterous he just he just goes out and begins to build this arc which is crazy but he receives the word of God and he does it without saying anything that silent aspect of Joseph I think is something that we've lost we want to dialogue about everything and fundamentally we don't just need to be heroes of the word but but doers and so the kind of man that receives the word of God and his obedient and then of course looking as a father to the common good of his family as opposed to his personal good so that for me is is really quite essential because it's the nature of any kind of patriarch right the one who who is a principle of fatherhood in the family to make sure that he's he's doing the things that he's doing in obedience to God but not simply for his own good for the good of his family so there's a sort of self-effacing quality to it that he finds his own vocation in the dispersal of the goods that he has and the service of the other persons for their good not simply for his own not that it's contrary to his own on the contrary it's quite personal to his good but it's he's looking to their goods before himself which is what you see in all the failures throughout the scriptures when someone fails in their fatherhood it's always the same reason they ceased to see the good of those for whom they care and they've begun to make it something that's private in particular to them that I want this and not this for them that makes sense to you absolutely it's so much that was a rich answer for sure father Sebastian anything else to add about what being a good father means to you I I teach philosophy so I think in terms of like kind of more precise definitions or something but when I think about what it means to be a good father what I think is a good father is someone who begets new life in his wife in love and then brings that new life to perfection by raising those children in love right so that's kind of that seems to be the heart of it right there has to be first of all that that relationship between the husband and wife that's not only be getting life but be getting in love and then once that life is born to to bring that new life to perfection in love as well right those are the essence of of what a good father would do and and since we broach the topic a little bit about how St. Joseph you know what's really striking about him what I remember thinking about St. Joseph more than anything is his perseverance in in dealing with difficulties he persevered through all those different things you can imagine finding out your wife is pregnant you had nothing to do with it and then how do you persevere through that right I often point out that the holiest marriage that ever existed almost ended in divorce and and yet St. Joseph he was able to go beyond the misunderstandings right and the holy family there's no way Joseph could understand why his wife was pregnant that way and conversely Mary couldn't understand why she had to move to Egypt in the middle of the night and then neither of them could understand why Jesus was there in the temple you know so even the holy family had these great misunderstandings and St. Joseph you really had to persevere through many difficult times and you can imagine the kind of inferiority complex St. Joseph would have you know when his wife is the immaculate conception his son is the incarnate word of God everything goes wrong and anything goes wrong in the family is your fault like hard enough you know being a husband or father if you're the smart one or you're the holy one or whatever but when every single virtue that everyone else in your family has they have it in a much higher degree than you have it and yet somehow you're called to leave this family on the side of God that must have been a great temptation to discouragement you think Joseph never got discouraged he persevered you know and it's interesting because he never he never responded to the evils or misunderstandings his life with anger he did respond with sorrow it is interesting right because um the angel when the angel comes to my dream he doesn't say Joseph don't don't be angry he never suspected our lady of infidelity he he's certainly realized she was a version of Isaiah 714 um but if the angel said don't be afraid right to take marry your wife into your home so it's a sign that Joseph he did suffer kind of sorrow he was probably afraid thinking to himself i don't belong in this family this family is too good for me this is not for me and he probably suffered from temptations to discouragement right and then of course when the child jesus was lost our lady says your father had been searching for you in sorrow not anger sorrow so saint joseph had to deal with responded to the difficulties in his life um that caused him great pain both anxiety and sorrow and yet he was able to overcome those things because he had the love and charity that believes all things and he trusted completely in god and probably worked himself to death you know he died he died a young man um i know um devin was saying that he's always depicted as an old man one of the things i contended in my book is he was not an old man right women don't walk in the middle of the night i mean there's no way that he was just an old daughter or a daughter and grandfather um he he was a young man but he probably died young because he had worked so hard to provide for the basic necessities of life he persevered through all of that so anyway that's the thing that struck me about saint joseph and one of the great virtues he had did not put into discouragement absolutely devin what about you what strikes you as uh what being a good father means and how that pertains to saint joseph yeah i love i love all that's been said right here and i do believe that joseph receiving mary into his home inaugurated his call to fatherly greatness i mean that's the first step for all of us his biological fathers is that we need to embrace our wives and and that was the same for saint joseph obviously he's the leader in that i think that uh fundamentally you know grace builds upon nature and perfects it and so what is fatherhood fatherhood is not merely a biological reality any man can be a biological father but it takes a real man to be a spiritual father so spiritual fatherhood builds upon biological father and a fatherhood and it perfects it right and so what is spiritual fatherhood you know spiritual fatherhood is to become an icon of god the father to be the face of the father that our children cannot see to be the voice of the father that our children cannot hear to be the touch of the father that our children cannot feel i believe that it's also um to not just accept our children but to choose them and what i mean by that is it's it's easy to accept things and just let things exist in our life and i think a lot of times we do that with our family our family just kind of exists together we live in the same house we out of the eat out of the same refrigerator and yet we don't actually choose them intentionally christ chooses us intentionally that's what the incarnation is all about and so god chooses us intentionally every father if he's a true spiritual father chooses his child his wife intentionally and gives himself to that person so if you see your kid sitting at the dinner table studying maybe sit down and have a conversation you know choose your child choose your daughters take him on daughter dates but the main thing here is is that our goal as fathers is as malachi chapter four verse six says to turn our hearts toward our children so our children turn their hearts toward us yes but when they know that they have our trust our affection and our spiritual gaze father they're going to be more willing to turn their gaze to the heavenly father so spiritual fatherhood is really the responsibility for souls you know i like to say there's three stages to manhood there's the boy there's the man and there's a father and the boy he's symbolized by the the tricycle training wheels he does anything to avoid pain and suffering and everybody he depends on everybody and nobody depends on him and then you got the man who's symbolized by the atv it's all about him and having fun and maybe he'll make his car payment just so he can have a car and pay his rent so he has a place maybe he'll brush his teeth so he can kiss a woman but it's mostly about him so the atv is about having fun and then there's the spiritual father and he's symbolized by the 53 foot you know semi trailer why because he's learned something the boy doesn't that he is called to assume sacrificial responsibility for everyone else he's called that everyone is called in a sense he's to depend on him for their spiritual welfare and so that's why he's got the trailer because his job is to haul souls to heaven that's what we're supposed to be doing as fathers great stuff there the the images i will remember those the tricycle the atv and the 53 foot trailer for sure no doubt about that let's go back to you father Sebastian your book about saint joseph a tan book we have out and encourage everyone to check it out man closest to christ is the name of your book can you tell us why you decided to write it to begin with and i'm always interested in talking to authors when they're researching their book if any surprises popped up while while you're in that process yeah you know um i decided to first try to just understand the person of saint joseph better in the year of saint joseph which was 2020 remember that um that was a year when everything was on lockdown and covid um it was a really rough year um i had very few pastoral activities during that time and um father calc calc can probably verify this too i remember feeling like a father who had enough to eat and had to watch his children starve during those those months when we couldn't even go out and bring communion to people it was horrible um but during that time i remember thinking it's a year of saint joseph i'm gonna i'm gonna start looking through the scriptures and i put together a couple talks on saint joseph and what i really wanted to do was i wanted to put something together that was founded completely on sacred scripture and sacred tradition because what i noticed was that nearly everything i'd read on saint joseph was from private revelation and while there's a place for that it's still not the same as sacred scripture and the problem was that that people kind of gave up in my opinion it looked like people gave up on looking in the scriptures deeply to find something about saint joseph so that was my kind of mission and i started reading and taking notes and i eventually realized gosh there's so much here i can find about saint joseph just in scripture alone i don't need to appeal to private revelation and um so that's what i did that's the reason i wrote the book because i i realized how much was really there that a lot of people were overlooking um then with regard to things like what surprised me um i was surprised at the sorts of things you could find in scripture about saint joseph i'll give you one example i think there's clear evidence in scripture that saint joseph was broadly assumed into heaven okay that may sound crazy or you know it certainly is surprising right but i used to kind of methodology that you find the fathers of the church first what i did is i looked at some types of saint joseph right there's the joseph the patriarch and the old testament and then the prophet elisha who's also type of saint joseph think about elisha he um he lived with a woman chastely whose son would later be raised from the dead right i mean that's a pretty good you know likeness to saint joseph he was forced to flee towards egypt by a ruler of israel um he was a spiritual father right and so forth there are a lot of similarities between elisha the prophet and and saint joseph so both those people from the old testament saint joseph the patriarch right at the end of his life it says that his body was translated into the holy land right that's already a sign of the um the the idea of a bodily assumption into heaven and then of course you have elisha the prophet right so already have typological evidence that um saint joseph may have been brought bodily into heaven so then i started looking more in the scriptures and there's this amazing passage of the finding the child jesus in the temple and in that passage jesus got something strange he says did you not know that it was necessary that i'd be in my father's house and then he says it says that they did not understand the saying which he spoke to them uh to erame and and what you find is that language is prophetic language whenever jesus in the gospels says that something's necessary when it's clearly for you it's in the fulfillment of scripture and almost always it has to do with the paschal mystery as passion death and resurrection right and also in saint luke's gospel that saying that that phrase to erama huh the saying that always refers to a prophetic word that later would be seen and as filmed by those to whom it was spoken for example peter understood the saying of jesus when the cock crowed right or um the shepherds understood the word the saying of the angels when they saw the the child of the manger so put all that together and now look at the events jesus is in Jerusalem after the Passover his mother is seeking for him and sorrow for three days and when they find him they ask he asks why were you seeking me right those are all exact parallels to what happens in our lord's passion death and resurrection right so it's it jesus's passion happens in Jerusalem after the Passover his mother is searching for him for three days and sorrow and when um the people are looking for him the angels say why were you seeking the living among the dead right then there's this amazing thing about jesus being in his father's house teaching right why does jesus say i had to be in my father's house and he didn't say i had to be in the temple well what happened to jesus between the time he died on the cross and the time he rose again we know st peter tells us he descended to the dead and he taught he preached to the souls in prison that's exactly what st peter says and who would have been among the dead when jesus ascended to the dead the most notable person that would have been among the dead would be his own father joseph so even that was an image foretelling his descent to the dead his meeting his father joseph and then a reunion of the holy family joseph jesus and mary after the resurrection and st matthew implies that he says that at jesus's after jesus's resurrection some were raised from the dead and appeared in the holy city right so this is surprising because you don't expect to find that in scripture but the whole point is when you start looking in scripture deeply prayerfully and look through the whole of scripture what you find is there's so much more hidden there than you would have first suspected so there's one example of something that surprised me as i was reading through the sacred scriptures and writing this book really appreciate that and and father calth and devin both of you guys i know have have done the same thing really through scriptures for saint joseph father calth when you were doing your book the imitation of saint joseph anything surprised you about what you found sure um i unlike father i i didn't i really appreciate what you were saying about about feeling like a father who has plenty of food and his children are starving i run a seminary so all everyone that's under my charge had to stay home it's not like a homeschooling dad is actually because we we stayed in house and we didn't go out we just stayed here which frost was great because we were able to actually live a bit more of a monastic life it was really quite um quite good for us but i i still knew the faithful in the diocese that they couldn't go anywhere for mass and things of nature and it said it was a huge pain uh pain of sorrow in the heart so when i when i wrote the book i i didn't i was asked to write the book um and i first said no because i thought how do you imitate someone whose voice you've never heard whose face you don't uh recognize per se um and because he he doesn't come to life in the scriptures at an at an easy glance as father was saying and so i didn't think that i would have anything to really say about imitating someone and what i wanted to avoid was the temptation that i had seen in in in some books some helpful but nevertheless some books that take joseph and make him a bit like a mannequin that they just clothe any way they want to with whatever virtues they want um i i wanted to know the man and um because he's a fact he's a reality historical reality and so i did begin by reading a number of different treatises that were very interesting very helpful relative to what we could know about saint joseph and his lineage and everything else and then i i just realized that i had to deal with father was saying um that in order to sort of touch the mind of god i have to go to the place where god has imprinted his mind um and just spend time with it and i was extremely surprised by exactly what father said i had no intention of doing anything other than a trying to assume that what joseph had available to him were his own fathers and since we are creatures of imitation and since similar to it is a kind of cause of love as saint thomas says then all the persons who came before of whose examples he would have witnessed he would have had something as we've said before that he would have pulled from that that was an example to him of what it was to be a father a patriarch because the litany of saint joseph of course talks about him as the light of the patriarchs right to either in some ways the fulfillment of the patriarchs so if that's the case then i tried to look at each of the patriarchs in history with the eyes of saint joseph and ask saint joseph questions about them what would you have seen what would you have taken from this um what lessons did the person learn from our lord himself as he taught abraham how to be a father to be a husband etc and all down the line that was tremendously telling for me because the very few references that we actually have is saint joseph the new testament they're so potent once you once you see where they all came from whether the fact that he's a just man or even his silence says is the fact that that joseph had um as was what stated about him the opposite vocation of the apostles in other words the apostles had one task and that's to take what they had themselves received and proclaim it and preach to all the nations and baptize them joseph's task was of course just the opposite to take the word that was spoken to him and hide it keep it protect it um and so i guess what surprised me the most in doing it because i was just sort of going across this thing in some ways chronologically through the scriptures and then looking at um what it was that joseph would have seen in our lord in our ladies since we have more texts of that but then finally not knowing as you do when you tell any story not really having any idea exactly where i was going with this i was just exploring in my own prayer um and then i got to the the point of saint joseph's death and i i asked myself the question this is what really surprised me uh if you're asking about a big surprise and doubled me over in my own office um was asking the question why didn't why didn't you let joseph live like why didn't you lord why didn't you let him live so that he would have been there uh for god's only son in the time of his deepest difficulty and agony and etc and it occurred to me that that if you have a vocation which has spent itself in the protection of the son and in some sense the hiding of the son it's kind of antithetical then to turn around and say now um do just the opposite right on the country he sort of he sort of removes him in some sense from the picture and says that the work that the son is going to do only the father himself is going to walk up that hill with him as it were relative to abraham and isaac right it's not joseph's role he wasn't there to protect him anymore he wasn't supposed to he didn't come to be protected the ultimate came to sacrifice himself and joseph was removed for that very reason in my read of it and would joseph have known this would he have sensed it would jesus have talked to him about it in any way shape or form i think so and yet that would have been a very that would have been a passion itself for joseph to not be able to imagine as a as a husband and a father being told that they're going to offer themselves in sacrifice and you can't stop it you actually have to assist in this in the in the way that i'm telling you in this case that to me made me made me shudder for the kind of strength of will and and goodness of of joseph himself and that obedience to the father for the caliph i have to have to add in there um i i thought something similar with regard to the um the prophecy of simian where he says to mary alone yes yes also sorts of appears and joseph realized at that moment i won't be there to protect either one yes yes i actually i think i i think i i think i actually wrote about that because it he must have like what it what about me you didn't you didn't mention me you didn't speak to him at all yeah exactly devin what about you as opposed to uh father sebastian and father cal um kustos isn't necessarily a traditional book maybe it's more of a an immersion type program for fathers and uh almost a guide for them why did you decide to to go that route and and what stood out to you as you were doing that in the process yeah so since 2005 i've been writing about st joseph and and studying him through the scriptures like these two priests have and very prayerful and intentional about that and believing that the scriptures you know are the divine revelation you know they're from god and and so in studying the scriptures i was discovering so much about st joseph and so kustos literally is a walk with st joseph over the course of 33 days through the scripture alone none of these other mistakes none of that um you you know none of that is strictly based on scripture and so what it does is you walk with st joseph from the very beginning when he discovers mary pregnant without his cooperation all the way until he departs from the scripture right and that's at the end where in the temple with jesus and so what kustos though is is not only following jesus bibl or joseph biblically but it also is comprised of seven stages and in each of those seven stages we have spiritual practices so we bring st joseph spirituality on these seven principles into the modern age and so each stage you choose from 33 different practices well each stage has its own set and you develop your own spirituality based on st joseph's way of life so at the end of 33 days the hope is and this was the goal of writing kustos was that i wanted men to not only learn about st joseph there's a lot of stuff out there about st joseph i wanted men to begin to live his spirituality his way of life and begin embodying it in such a way because i believe that society goes by the family and the family goes by way of the father and so if we want the world to change we fathers we need to change and the father is the lynch pin and statistics show this all over the place and so i believe that if we could get men to live st joseph spirituality by embodying these practices by day 33 god willing they would have their own way of life based on st joseph spirituality and begin to live that so that's kind of why it's called a boot camp but yeah it's very scriptural and one of the things that i discovered that well there's many things i discovered about st joseph that really blew me away but one of the things that i found to be very powerful was that when he was deliberating over the blessed virgin mary's pregnancy and he discovered mary pregnant without his cooperation it says that joseph was pondering these things and it doesn't sound like much it sounds like maybe joseph was sitting back having a cigar and a bourbon you know huh that's interesting mary's pregnant you know but it was way more than that that word pondering the greek is enthamaeum and enthamaeum the greek comes from that greek root word thumos which the greeks believe was the masculine warrior spirit the definition of a real man and so st joseph he has this masculine warrior spirit he's a real man he wants to fight for what is right for what is just yet enthamaeum is when the warrior spirit is grieving like father sabashin said he was grieving over this potential loss of mary his his potential absence in the whole divine birth and being the husband of mary he knew mary's holiness he knew her beauty her purity her innocence and yet he could not on one hand prove that mary was innocence you know prove it on the other hand he would never condemn her because he did not think she committed adultery so he was stuck in a terrible place and this is what i love about joseph he takes it to the silence he doesn't post it on instagram or facebook hashtag may you know my wife is pregnant without you know my cooperation no he takes it to the silence and he waits on the lord he presents his grieving heart to the lord in silence and then the and then he waits and and we don't know if it was two minutes two hours two days two weeks two months we don't know how long it took but we know that joseph he entered the silence he took its grievance to god and he trusted to god and he waited and he did it over and over again until god commanded him to rise and do what he was supposed to do and that's what every man i believe really needs to learn to is develop a rich prayer life to actually enter the silence to listen more than we talk we've got two ears and one mouth so we should be doing twice as much listening to god as we are talking and i think that that's what st joseph's life was built on was in fact i know it is because in the in the greek the greek word for uh when joseph went to put mary away privately that word privately is latra which means secret it reminds us of matthew six six where your father who is in secret will repay you joseph is an icon of god the father who lives in secret he sacrifices in secret he prays in secret his life is one of hidden secrecy and silence and sacrifice and i believe that if we men we start to embrace this particularly in our prayer life the world will change good stuff there devin uh and you you did kind of touch on it there father sabash and i was wondering if you could uh maybe expand on the idea of why st joseph in particular and some of the traits that we've already discussed so important for especially men and fathers in today's world yeah you know one of the things that that has happened to men in in the modern world is that they've been emasculated you know that really the heart of masculinity has been taken away from them um they've been told for example that fighting for any real reason is bad they've been told um that they should be more like women uh they've been told that they can just be perpetual adolescents and just live their life seeking pleasure and without responsibility huh and then they've been abandoned right where they don't have an example someone who's there to show them all those things so you know the masculinity of st joseph his willingness to to fight to persevere for what's right and what's good his sense of complete and utter self-sacrifice right he was a man who utterly loved without seeking to be loved who who simply would completely put his his life on the line and sacrifice every single his father kathwa sank private good everything that was just you know his own for the sake of the common good of his family and out of love for his wife those things are absolutely essential today because i i'm convinced about this that there are many many young men today who contrary to god's intention have been deprived of a real example of a father yeah um and it's not their fault they literally just come into the world and they don't get a dad either because their mom and dad are divorced or because of the other things that i mentioned the way that's the message that society's trying to give to men and god's not going to stand by and let that innocent child you know who's been wounded like that have no other alternative he always gives some other means of of finding his grace and in these times in these later days in the church it's my opinion that he's placing st joseph there up on a pedestal so the young men who don't have that example of fatherhood in their own lives can look to st joseph and imitate his virtues and receive his fatherly care in this life and in the life to come father cal if anything to add to the the importance of the the here and now lessons that we can take from st joseph absolutely i think what father was saying is the very reason that the church is highlighting him now because she she draws our attention to the thing that we need most and in the age in which we need it most and if if you recall st joseph has been in the background as he was in the scriptures but he's been in the background for the entirety of the life of the church he only made it into the canon of the mass the eucharistic prayer and the time of john the 23rd and so why does the church focus our attention on him because of exactly what father is saying this refusal to admit of men to the stage of fatherhood because fatherhood says something it says you can't create yourself it says you come from somewhere it says you have a lineage you've received something i know you have to step up the plate to then of course give it on and if that's the case project me doesn't really simply exist right i can't i can't just i can't just be concerned about about myself um and so the two things that struck me when i was listening to father that i that i recall that things i try to instill in the men here and i think they're extremely important that i see in st joseph um one in sort of an image of an anti-image of adam though he is not the new adam he is the the father of the new adam in the sense um is the the necessitive saying no that first of all learning how to say no to yourself in terms of that sort of self denial that is required um to serve another um but then to say no to other persons when they want something that is not good for them um and that's the it's essential for fatherhood but we think that being a father now has to be something in which we're indulgent or kind in in in such a way that it just means giving you whatever you're asking we're on the contrary the very reason that adam felt is because he didn't say no that this is not good for you i love you sufficiently to say no to this uh for you and for me so that that that capacity of self mastery only happens in the growth in virtues when you're willing to say no to lesser goods for higher ones you can't impart that to anyone else unless you want to do it for yourself secondarily the the scene that struck me with saint joseph about the kind of the genius and creativity that should happen in a man's life when he's the head of a family um i think is displayed beautifully in the nativity um here you have failure you know his father said you're the only one doing something wrong because he's a macro conception the son of god um and you have failure you have you have no provision you in some ways it didn't seem as if you provided for them and instead of wringing his hands and sucking his thumb and being um said about the fact that i knew i should have been chosen for this or backing away or what have you he does something totally creative you know could you imagine if we had the kresh scenes every every christmas um be in a hotel uh be in and in right we we love them because he chose to create something beautiful out of it um he saw an opportunity and i could just see him in my mind's eye having this idea coming up with something and making it good and beautiful and saying to our lady i've got an idea right and then what husband doesn't say that properly to his wife when he's he's trying to make something and build something for his family i have an idea and how would she respond to something like that absolutely a woman gives a man a strength to be able to put those ideas into motion when she believes in him and honors him and if you imagine what look our lady must have given him like absolutely right and he takes care of it and he provides the most beautiful scene and it's a place that is greater than any end because the angels themselves go there and the kings go everyone goes um and joseph chose that it wasn't he didn't get revelation from god and what to do um as was heard here earlier sometimes you hit that ceiling of reason and i got two contraries and i don't know which way to go and you grapple with god like jake had been the night you wrestle with the thing and you have that that grieving that goes on in a prayer life and i don't know and you have to wait on god's revelation and in this case he wasn't given any revelation he had to choose in accordance with his own reason and his own lights and he made something beautiful out of a situation which was you know rather horrific when your wife is going to about to give travel and you have nowhere for her to be a perfect time for a question here thus far the statements about st joseph focused on how he can help men women need st joseph desperately need him i think if only because many men in contemporary culture have abused women in so many ways uh debon why don't you start here uh what about what about st joseph and what women can learn from his life his example well i think that well there's a lot that women i think all of us could learn from st joseph um one of the big things like father was just saying just a moment ago that i think is huge is when mary is pregnant and they're in bethlehem and it's time for her to be delivered and there's no room for them in the end and there's many reasons that we can you know conjecture why that was um but joseph had to provide and mary had to actually you know accept this situation not only accept it but to choose it for the lord to embrace it fully and this is what i see with that manger scene um they find a cave probably joseph did and what's interesting about this it's the cold of the night there's no light um it is it is cold it is filthy in this manger scene it there's a stench because animals are doing what animals do and it is there it's kind of almost like a back alley birth it is there in which the birth takes place and here it is the shepherds they stumble well they don't stumble they find this beautiful scene of what mary and joseph huddled keeping warm in this manger in this in this scene with jesus and they're contemplating the word made flesh and this is beautiful this is a community of persons that's symbolic of the trinity the self-giving love of the trinity and yet nevertheless the cold the filth the darkness it all remains but what's the key here they have peace they have joy they have communion because they have this intimate relationship between one another this community of persons and this adoration of god made flesh and this is what i think women men all of us can learn is the stench ain't going away you know the suffering is not going to cease but it's what we do with it and what we see from the holy family is that it's almost as like it was a backdrop but it didn't stop them at all they were in love they were in love with god and that was all that mattered and they were able to conquer the darkness of the night they were able to conquer the coldness of hell with the warmth that that furnace that fueled self-giving love in the holy family and so i think that women men all of us can learn from that is yes don't pray for the suffering to go away pray for the grace as st andre beset says to to persevere amidst it i think that's a great way to wrap us up here i wanted to give one more reminder though that if you guys want to learn more about saying joseph specifically and some of the lessons that you learned here today you can certainly check out the great works that all of you gentlemen have done kustos from debon shat the 33 day preparation for fullness of divine sonship and spiritual fatherhood imitation of st joseph from by father matthew kalf and st joseph the man closest to christ all of those are available at tanbooks.com we have a winner of those books today for free our winner today and mariana esposito is going to get a copy of those books free from tanbooks we have really appreciate marianas and others participations in our comments section today encourage you to continue to do that with our town realm round tables that we have monthly also you can take advantage of our discount today use the code tan talk 40 on tanbooks.com and you will get a 40 discount on the books that we've talked about today if you have any questions for us you can email talks at tanbooks.com before we completely wrap up today i was hoping father sebastian maybe you can end us with a prayer here sure in the name of the father into the son of the holy spirit amen amen heavenly father we thank you for the gift of st joseph you've made him a father to your own son and you've made him a father to the members of your son's mystical body each of us in the church we ask that you give us the blessing to draw ever closer to st joseph that he might bring us closer to your son jesus christ now mighty god bless you the father the son the holy spirit amen amen amen father sebastian father matthew kalf devin shat really appreciate your time your education and insight into st joseph today i know uh i'm certainly blessed to have learned from your expertise your research your your time and dedication to st joseph specifically thank you for joining us here on the round table thank you thank you appreciate it god bless you and again like i said we have monthly round tables here at tan books tanbooks.com for any other resources thank you for joining us today on the round table