Prayer to St. Joseph for Employment

Let us pray to St. Joseph for jobs for all of those suffering unemployment because of the Biden regime.

 O good father, Joseph! I beg you, by all your sufferings, sorrows and joys, to obtain for me what I ask. Help me find a job quickly that meets my financial needs and has a long and stable future. By the work of your hands and the sweat of your brow, you supported Jesus and Mary, and had the Son of God as your fellow worker. When I find a job, teach me to work as you did, with patience and perseverance, for God and for those whom God has given me to support. Teach me to see in my fellow workers the Christ who desires to be in them, that I may always be charitable and forbearing towards all. Grant me to look upon work with the eyes of faith, so that I shall recognize in it my share in God’s own creative activity and in Christ’s work of our redemption, and so take pride in it. When it is pleasant and productive, remind me to give thanks to God for it. And when it is burdensome, teach me to offer it to God, in reparation for my sins and the sins of the world. Amen.

I started this novena a month and a half after my husband was released from his job. He had one interview but no job offers. Thankfully on the 7th day, he received a job offer and starts his new job and career a week from tomorrow. Thank you St. Joseph and the Lord for hearing my prayers! – Sam Thanks be to God through the intercession of St. Joseph!!! The contract for our new house was signed today on St. Joseph’s feast day…the day after I finished the novena! – Christy St. Joseph Novena Prayers St. Joseph Novena - Day 1 Saint Joseph, you are the faithful protector and intercessor of all who love and venerate you. You know that I have confidence in you and that, after Jesus and Mary, I come to you as an example for holiness, for you are especially close with God. Therefore, I humbly commend myself, with all who are dear to me and all that belong to me, to your intercession. I beg of you, by your love for Jesus and Mary, not to abandon me during life and to assist me at the hour of my death. Glorious Saint Joseph, spouse of the Immaculate Virgin, pray for me to have a pure, humble, charitable mind, and perfect resignation to the divine Will. Be my guide, my father, and my model through life that I may die as you did in the arms of Jesus and Mary. Loving Saint Joseph, faithful follower of Jesus Christ, I raise my heart to you to implore your powerful intercession in obtaining from the Divine Heart of Jesus all the graces necessary for my spiritual and temporal welfare, particularly the grace of a happy death, and the special grace I now implore: (Mention your request) Guardian of the Word Incarnate, I feel confident that your prayers on my behalf will be graciously heard before the throne of God. St. Joseph Most Just, Pray for us! Amen. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Read more at: https://www.praymorenovenas.com/st-joseph-novena

Saint Joseph, you are the faithful protector and intercessor of all who love and venerate you. You know that I have confidence in you and that, after Jesus and Mary, I come to you as an example for holiness, for you are especially close with God. Therefore, I humbly commend myself, with all who are dear to me and all that belong to me, to your intercession. I beg of you, by your love for Jesus and Mary, not to abandon me during life and to assist me at the hour of my death. Glorious Saint Joseph, spouse of the Immaculate Virgin, pray for me to have a pure, humble, charitable mind, and perfect resignation to the divine Will. Be my guide, my father, and my model through life that I may die as you did in the arms of Jesus and Mary. Loving Saint Joseph, faithful follower of Jesus Christ, I raise my heart to you to implore your powerful intercession in obtaining from the Divine Heart of Jesus all the graces necessary for my spiritual and temporal welfare, particularly the grace of a happy death, and the special grace I now implore: (Mention your request) Guardian of the Word Incarnate, I feel confident that your prayers on my behalf will be graciously heard before the throne of God. St. Joseph Most Just, Pray for us! Amen. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Read more at: https://www.praymorenovenas.com/st-joseph-novena

Saint Joseph, you are the faithful protector and intercessor of all who love and venerate you. You know that I have confidence in you and that, after Jesus and Mary, I come to you as an example for holiness, for you are especially close with God. Therefore, I humbly commend myself, with all who are dear to me and all that belong to me, to your intercession. I beg of you, by your love for Jesus and Mary, not to abandon me during life and to assist me at the hour of my death. Glorious Saint Joseph, spouse of the Immaculate Virgin, pray for me to have a pure, humble, charitable mind, and perfect resignation to the divine Will. Be my guide, my father, and my model through life that I may die as you did in the arms of Jesus and Mary. Loving Saint Joseph, faithful follower of Jesus Christ, I raise my heart to you to implore your powerful intercession in obtaining from the Divine Heart of Jesus all the graces necessary for my spiritual and temporal welfare, particularly the grace of a happy death, and the special grace I now implore: (Mention your request) Guardian of the Word Incarnate, I feel confident that your prayers on my behalf will be graciously heard before the throne of God. St. Joseph Most Just, Pray for us! Amen. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Read more at: https://www.praymorenovenas.com/st-joseph-novena

Hope in God

There is really no one else to whom we can turn. Father Mark writes beautifully of the virtue of hope, saying:

The world judges harshly those who go forward in life, leaving behind them a trail of wrecked hopes and failures. I am learning, after so many years, to give thanks for every wrecked hope and to bless God for every failure. It is altogether too easy to glory in vain hopes and to boast of one's achievements (be they spiritual, academic, or material), and to forfeit the one hope held out by God, the hope that promises and delivers the only happiness that leaves no aftertaste of bitterness: hope in God for God. The value of achievements and possessions must be measured against "the One Thing Necessary . . . the Best Part." (Luke 10:42). Is not this why Our Lord says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"? (Matthew 5:3)

The Name of Jesus is enshrined, like a jewel set in a precious setting, at the very heart of today's Gospel. Even as I look at the layout of the Gospel -- it is but a single verse -- on the page of the Evangeliary, I see that the Name of Jesus occurs precisely in the middle of text. One who receives the Name of Jesus from the Gospel, and holds it in his heart, will find that it becomes there an unfailing wellspring of hope. The Name of Jesus is an anchor of hope in the soul's secret depths, a reason -- no, the only reason -- for hoping against hope when the forces of despair marshaled by the world, the flesh, and the devil, threaten to pull one into the outer darkness of complete despondency.

Our Blessed Lady and Saint Joseph
Our Blessed Lady and in Saint Joseph demonstrate and illustrate the virtue of hope, especially in the Infancy narratives of the Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke. Both of them received in secret, as it were, the adorable Name of Jesus; Our Lady from the Archangel Gabriel (Luke 1:31), even before she uttered her Fiat(Luke 1:38), and Saint Joseph from the Angel who came to him in a dream by night (Matthew 1:21). The Most Holy Name of Jesus held in their hearts and endlessly repeated became for both of them the fountain of hope that neither deceives nor confounds those who stake their very lives upon it.

Not only do Our Blessed Lady and Saint Joseph demonstrate and illustrate the virtue of hope; they also dispense it, in abundance, to the souls who seek their intercession. Our Lady, being the Mediatrix of All Graces is Spes Nostra, Our Hope. Where Mary is, there is hope. It is enough for a soul to seek the presence of Mary, and to pronounce her sweet name for hope to fill the terrible void of despair.

As for Saint Joseph, he graciously imparts the grace of hope to those who ask for his paternal help. Saint Joseph, having held fast to hope amidst darkness and trials, is now charged with helping, from his place in heaven, those who are tempted against this virtue that the powers of darkness so hate. With good reason does the Church invoke Saint Joseph as the "Terror of Demons," for when Saint Joseph enters a crisis to bring souls heavenly aid, he foils every diabolical plot to cast them into despair. (Read more.)

 

From First Things:

Concern for the world is a function of love. Clark finds inspiration in Franciscan spirituality, which “is founded . . . on a strong awareness of the inwardness of things.” Franciscans aren’t practical in that they don’t look for ways to bend the world to their own purposes. Their delight in creation is like falling in love. “The love experienced for all created things,” Clark suggests, “even in their weak and fallen state, even when the broken reflections of the glory cannot now be pieced together, is the only sure basis from which to care for the world.”

Like faith, hope is an essential epistemological virtue. In the words of C. S. Peirce, “the only assumption on which (the scientist) can act rationally is the hope of success” in his explorations of the logos of things. Scientists and mathematicians often follow the lure of beauty, motivated by a Keatsian expectation that beauty is truth, and truth beauty. Scientific progress hinges on hope that creation will be found to reflect the convergence of transcendentals found in the Creator.

We need hope to seek the full truth of things. As J. C. Powys said, our world resounds with “the scream of the victim in the hands of the police . . . the starvation-groan of the famished . . . the weeping of the lynched . . . the howl of the executed . . . the inert despair of the jobless.” We flinch and look away. We anesthetize ourselves with 24/7 diversions. We embrace the comforting evasions of Panglossian philosophers like Spinoza or Marcus Aurelius.

We can’t know the truth if we’re deaf to the world’s anguished shrieks, if we avert our gaze from the charnel house. But can we bear so much reality? Not, Clark argues, without hope that evils will be repaired or redeemed. Given our own capacity for evil, moreover, our hope must be directed outside ourselves. We must, Clark says, “devise some story which will make it possible to believe in a God both almighty and well-meaning, because our faith is vain if He does not play fair.” We’re on the road to saintliness when we’re gripped by “hope that the evils of the world can be, will be, remedied.” The force of Clark’s argument is more general: We embark on the road of sanity only when we walk in hope. Hope is the source of natural virtue. (Read more.)

Women and Silence

Let women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted them to speak, but to be subject, as also the law saith. But if they would learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church. ~I Corinthians 14: 34

This elusive verse, when not totally ignored, is a matter of controversy, as scholars and theologians try to explain it away. St. Paul, not caring a fig for political correctness, past or present, wanted it to be clear that women were not to usurp the functions of priests at the altar. On another level, the spiritual director at our Secular Carmelite meeting said that the verse is not to be seen as a negation of women but as a call, a call to silence, both interior and exterior. It is in the deep silence of the soul that spiritual warfare on behalf of the Church, her ministers and her people, is best waged. Many women have sought a life of prayer and have become prayer warriors, from the earliest days of the Church, when Our Lady prayed in the cenacle for the Holy Spirit to descend. Women have sought the contemplative life in great numbers, building monasteries that became centers of learning and culture, where kings and bishops went for advice. Sometimes it harder to fight a long hidden battle, a battle with no glory or outward appreciation, yet it is such battles that win graces for the multitudes. As Dr. Alice von Hildebrand writes:

Because a woman by her very nature is maternal -- for every woman, whether married or unmarried, is called upon to be a biological, psychological or spiritual mother -- she knows intuitively that to give, to nurture, to care for others, to suffer with and for them -- for maternity implies suffering -- is infinitely more valuable in God's sight than to conquer nations and fly to the moon.

When one reads the life of St. Teresa of Avila or St. Thérèse of Lisieux, one is struck by the fact that they constantly refer to their "weakness." The lives of these heroic women -- and there are many -- teach us that an awareness and acceptance of one's weakness, coupled with a boundless confidence in God's love and power, grant these privileged souls a strength that is so great because it is supernatural.

Natural strength cannot compete with supernatural strength. This is why Mary, the blessed one, is "strong as an army ready for battle." And yet, she is called "clemens, pia, dulcis Virgo Maria." This supernatural strength explains -- as mentioned by Dom Prosper Gueranger in "The Liturgical Year" -- that the devil fears this humble virgin more than God because her supernatural strength that crushes his head is more humiliating for him than God's strength.

This is why the Evil One is today launching the worst attack on femininity that has ever taken place in the history of the world. For coming closer to the end of time, and knowing that his final defeat is coming, he redoubles his efforts to attack his one great enemy: the woman. It says in Genesis 3:15: "I will put enmity between you and the woman." The final victory is hers, as seen in the woman crowned with the sun.

Women like St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who embraced a lifestyle of silence, are both regarded as Doctors of the Church, with St. Thérèse hailed as Patroness of the Missions. Thus the Church acknowledges that the struggle to seek and find God in silence is a struggle with far-reaching consequences for the entire world. St. Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein) describes the redemptive suffering of spiritual motherhood:

The difficult struggle for existence is allocated primarily to man and the hardship of childbirth to woman. But a promise of redemption is present inasmuch as the woman is charged with the battle against evil;; the male sex is to be exalted by the coming of the Son of God. The redemption will restore the original order. The pre-eminence of man is disclosed by the Savior's coming to earth in the form of man. The feminine sex is ennobled by virtue of the Savior's being born of a human mother; a woman was the gateway through which God found entrance to mankind....A woman should honor the image of Christ in her husband by free and loving subordination; she herself is to be the image of God's mother; but that also means she is to be in Christ's image. (Essays on Woman, ICS Publications, 1985, p.69)

I hope that someday silence will again be seen as grace-filled and life-giving rather than as oppressive. Strength and power can be found in acknowledging one's weakness and helplessness before God. Women can have great influence, not in sharing the ministerial duties traditionally given to men but in the battlefield of the spirit, where all real battles are fought.