St. Joseph and the vocation of consecrated laymen

Why be a consecrated layman, and not a priest? I am, after all, ‘available’ for the priesthood. I’m not married. Why not go ‘all the way,’ and seek ordination?

As a layman in the life of the evangelical counsels as a part of Madonna House Apostolate, these questions are posed to me from time to time. In response to these questions, additional questions have arisen in my own heart: Why might any consecrated laymen remain laymen, and not become priests? There are many ‘available’ men already dedicated in a life of poverty, chaste celibacy, and obedience—those in the various new communities of the Church—including the Johannesgemeinschaft, Communion and Liberation, Focolare, Opus Dei, and Madonna House (MH).

Do most of the men in these communities remain laymen because they lack the ‘goods’ to serve as priests? Or might the calling of laymen living the life of the counsels, rather, contain its own specific and irreplaceable content?

Even with the flowering of the Church’s affirmation in the past century of the import of the priesthood of the baptized, there remains in some of the otherwise healthiest and most vibrant pockets of Catholic culture the latent sense that the ordained priesthood is somehow the fullest expression of Christian discipleship. That said, there is a wonderful affirmation of the vocation of the laity and the vocation of marriage and family in these lively sectors of the Church today. Still, the vocation of the consecrated layman doesn’t tend to fall on the radar of young Catholic men in their vocational search.

Within vibrant pockets of the Church today, there’s an awakening enthusiasm for the raw basics of Christian discipleship. Many young adult Catholics have an appetite to see discipleship lived out. They’re seeking an entry point into the stream of Christian discipleship. As a part of this awakening in Catholic parishes, youth ministries, and campus ministries—in contexts where young men are seeking their vocation—we’d do well in the North American Church to highlight the vocation of laymen in the life of the evangelical counsels, alongside that of priesthood and marriage.

After the example of the Church’s first consecrated layman, St. Joseph, the vocation of the consecrated layman today serves as a reminder and sign of the raw basics of being a disciple of Christ—of abiding with him, of serving him, and of utter availability to him. It’s an irreplaceable expression and instantiation of discipleship. St. Joseph, as the patronal saint of the MH laymen, serves as the MH laymen’s vocational-spiritual model, marking out for us our own vocational space and ethos within the Church and the world.

The proposal I’m making here is that there’s a great deal of potential for young men to see in St. Joseph a model for laymen to live the life of the evangelical counsels in various communities and settings. Let’s explore, then, some questions about the vocation of consecrated laymen, and aspects of the figure of Joseph as offering a template for this vocation. In Joseph’s silent witness, we find some answers for today. We’ll touch here upon just a few of the aspects of the vocation of St. Joseph and the other laymen after him living the counsels—aspects serving as important signs for the Church in the world today.

A sign of the raw basics of discipleship

If being an MH layman doesn’t involve marriage and doesn’t involve ordination, what does it involve? What’s it all about?

The vocation of the laity in the life of the counsels (which is the topic of a book by Hans Urs von Balthasar) and of the MH laymen, in particular, has a vast content of its own. It isn’t just a matter of not being married and not being ordained. It’s about finding a home in God. Being a disciple of Christ—in any vocation—consists in abiding with him and in losing our lives with him. This is true of laymen in the life of the counsels. It’s not fundamentally about serving a particular practical function. Balthasar insisted upon this point.

Part of what it takes to appreciate this particular calling of the layman to make a definitive gift of self in a life of poverty, obedience, and chaste celibacy, is a theological imagination that perceives the profundity and beauty of the raw basics of Christian discipleship. This theological imagination is alive and well today in the more vibrant parts of the Church. The time is ripe, then, for a heightened awareness of the lay consecrated life and the raw basics of discipleship. And I think the vocation of St. Joseph and the MH laymen have a role to play in subtly drawing attention to these raw basics.

It is fitting for St. Joseph to serve as a template for the vocation of any layman in the life of the counsels. In a particular way, Joseph provides the primary template for the MH layman’s relation to and place within the Body of Christ and the Bride of Christ, the Church. Joseph likewise provides the primary template for the MH layman’s relation to the Eucharistic body of Christ, the body of Christ with whom he maintained a home, which he built up in anticipation of Pentecost, and over which he stood guard as protector, nourisher, reverent servant, and chaste lover.

An ecclesial place

Joseph is a part of the proto-Church. He’s a part of the Church anticipating the Passion. Joseph anticipates and forms the Church of Mary and John beneath the Cross. He anticipates the Paschal outpouring of water and blood flowing from Christ’s side. He anticipates and makes ready the ecclesial community of Pentecost, gathered around Mary in the Upper Room following the Lord’s Ascension. Joseph stands guard over the Church. He stands beside the Church, beside the ecclesial and Eucharistic body of Christ, beside the Bride of Christ, beneath her, carrying her. Joseph is a restored David. He is a key part of the restoration of Adam as priestly and prophetic king.

We must revere the beauty and uniqueness of the ordained priesthood. We must appreciate the peculiar stamp of Christ the Good Shepherd and Great High Priest which ordination leaves upon the heart and soul of the man ordained. But ordained priests are not more a part of an inner circle of Christ’s disciples than are the laity. The laity are not to simply approximate the intimate discipleship of Christ in which the ordained participate. By getting ordained, a man does play an irreplaceable role and is peculiarly stamped. But a man doesn’t thus become more of a ‘real deal’ disciple than he had previously been. He doesn’t become more of a legitimate disciple than his lay brothers and sisters. Ordination doesn’t provide an access point to discipleship with Jesus that is more intimate than the discipleship of the laity. Ordination isn’t a ticket to a sphere of intimacy with Christ from which others are barred.

Discipleship of Christ consists of discovering a home outside of ourselves and in God’s heart, to use Balthasar’s terminology. A key way in which countless disciples of Christ have made this discovery—independent of receiving the sacrament of holy orders—has been by entering into Jesus’s own life of poverty, his life of obedience, and his life of chaste love. It’s a vocation that St. Joseph of Nazareth lived, in anticipation of the paschal birth of the Church. It’s a vocation that the laymen of MH, in Joseph’s footsteps, are called to live out as well.

The MH laymen are among the ranks of those Catholic laymen who render themselves in utter self-gift to Christ and the Church in a life of poverty, obedience, and chaste celibacy, alongside laymen of Communion and Liberation, the Johannesgemeinschaft (Commuity of St. John), Opus Dei, Focolare, and other similar groups. Such consecrated laymen are in a position to live out the priestly, prophetic, and royal identity of the lay baptized. By occupying this ‘position,’ they highlight for the rest of the Catholic laity the importance and dignity of their role as baptized disciples of Christ.

The vocation of the laity in the life of the counsels—a vocation that is largely under the radar even in the most vibrant and most faithful corners of the Church—is a vocation that can help make the Church more vibrant and more faithful. This vocation of laymen in a life of definitive self-gift in the form of a formal commitment to poverty, obedience, and chaste celibacy for the sake of the kingdom is a vocation that likewise has a great deal of potential for being a subtle though mighty evangelical leaven in pockets of society which are otherwise impenetrable by the Church.

A place in the Church

The Johannesgemeinschaft (i.e., the Community of St. John) is a community of laymen, women, and priests, founded by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr. The laymen of the Johannesgemeinschaft have St. John the Beloved as their vocational template and model. In a similar manner, the laymen of MH have St. Joseph as their template and model. Both the Johannesgemeinschaft laymen and the MH laymen, then, have as their respective vocational models two of the men who lived most intimately with Our Lady and Jesus. Both communities likewise seek to live out aspects of the charism and mission of St. John or St. Joseph in 21st-century society today, precisely as laymen.

Neither St. John nor St. Joseph, it must be remembered, was simply there to be Mary’s and Jesus’ bodyguard and handyman (though the fisherman John and the carpenter Joseph likely did serve Mary and Jesus in these practical ways). Nor can the vocation of the Johannesgemeinschaft laymen or MH laymen be reduced to being the bodyguards and handymen at the service of the women of these respective communities. To get at the fundamental Joseph identity of the MH laymen, we mustn’t look primarily at the MH laymen’s function, but at his relation to and his place within the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ—as Balthasar says of all those in the life of the counsels.¹

Like the Johannesgemeinschaft laymen, the MH laymen are in a special position within the Church; ours is an inherently ecclesial place of existence. As bearers of the spirit of St. Joseph, the MH laymen have a particular relationship with Mary, able to respond to a divine call to love the Church, to love Mary, to love women, and to love and safeguard womanhood. We are to able to demonstrate an authentic masculinity and participate in the redemption of the meaning of manhood in a societal context in which this meaning is thoroughly obscured and broken.

We’re in a particular position to love Christ in myriad ways and to love the Eucharistic Body of Christ. We’re in a special position to honor and protect the meaning of the ordained priesthood, as guardians of the priestly Christchild, and as collaborators with our ordained MH brothers and with those many additional priests with whom we come into contact. We’re in a special position to highlight and demonstrate the meaning of the priesthood of all the baptized. We’re in a special position to highlight, demonstrate, and participate in the restoration of the priestly, prophetic, and kingly identity of the baptized.

We’re in a special position to participate in the restoration of humanity’s priestly, prophetic, and royal identity. We’re in a special position to participate in the restoration of humanity’s—and particularly, male humanity’s—broken kingship, broken prophetic role, and broken priestly image. We’re in a special position to bear the wounds of humanity within our hearts and to lay bare our own hearts’ wounds. We’re in an unusual vocational location to love humanity and to love the Church—that bridal body unto which the broken pieces of humanity are gathered.

We’re in this position because we’re called to exercise a prophetic and priestly kingship in the various contexts in which God places us, in the circumstances the Lord God gives to us, in the tasks he assigns to us.

The space occupied by Joseph and the Madonna House Laymen

This is precisely what Joseph did: he exercised his prophetic and priestly kingship by way of loving Mary and the Christ child and his neighbors and collaborators in the Nazareth village, in the Bethlehem cave, in his temporary neighborhood in Egypt, on the dusty roads of Palestine—all under the shadow of the Cross, ever embracing the anticipated Cross. Joseph’s life was one of making ready for and cultivating the manifestation of the God hidden within Israel’s midst, hidden in his own intimate company.

Early on during my initial stay at Madonna House’s main center in rural Ontario, I began finding myself assuming the existential and spiritual space of St. Joseph alongside other laymen who occupied that same existential and spiritual space, and alongside women who occupied a similar (though different) existential and spiritual space, and alongside priests who likewise occupied a similar existential-spiritual space, but in a distinctive manner, different from the laymen and each different from one another, though at the same time integrally related to the laymen and irreplaceably so.

So, too, as I began to experience it at MH, each layman occupied that Joseph-like existential-spiritual space in a drastically different manner from any other layman at MH. Yet somehow there was an overlap in this shared existential space, something in common that makes the MH laymen what they are, that makes each of the members of MH what they are—the laymen, the priests, the women.

The exact nature of this is difficult to express. Perhaps St. Joseph put it best by way of his utter silence. Perhaps he put it most eloquently by leaving behind an exquisite literary legacy of utter wordlessness as his tribute to the Mystery of the Virgin and Child with whom he dwelled for so many years. But I think that the space occupied by St. Joseph and the MH laymen has a great deal to do with Joseph’s and the MH laymen’s own way of being called out of self and into God—to use the terminology of Balthasar.

These reflections hardly scratch the surface of the mystery of our vocation and are insufficient to express the vastness of our calling. This is an initial and all-too-brief account of only some aspects of the meaning and content of the vocation of the MH laymen, a vocation called forth by God, as in a dream: “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 1:20).

Endnote:

¹ Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Laity and the Life of the Counsels: The Church’s Mission in the World, trans. Brian McNeil with D.C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 14-15.