God brought me to Christ and to His Church by way of fear. Twenty-five years ago, I was a young man with a social anxiety disorder, panic attacks, and depression, and out of that darkness I first cried out to Him. By His grace the crippling fears were overcome. But fear and anxiety did not simply pack their bags and leave. They moved into a smaller room down the hall, and I have been dealing with them ever since.
So, when I discovered, three years ago, that two petitions in the ancient devotion to the Seven Sorrows and Joys of St. Joseph ask precisely for the grace of “surmounting all anxiety” and of being “disengaged from all fear,” my ears perked up. I began praying the novena, and I haven’t stopped since.
A Devotion Born at Sea
The devotion has a dramatic origin. Two Franciscan friars were sailing along the coast of Flanders when a storm sank their ship. They grabbed hold of a plank, and for three days and nights they were tossed on the waves, clinging to the wood and to St. Joseph, begging his help.
The saint appeared to them as a young man and, acting as their pilot, guided them into a safe harbor. He told them he was Joseph and asked them to recite the Our Father and Hail Mary seven times each day in memory of his seven sorrows and seven joys.
The devotion pairs seven sorrows with seven joys drawn from the Gospels, each followed by a petition, an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Glory Be. It is in the petitions that the devotion really shines.
Joseph Had Every Reason to Be Afraid
God told St. Joseph very little: an angel in a dream, a handful of instructions, and a great deal of silence. His betrothed was with child. There was no room at the inn. He had to take his family into a hostile, foreign land with no assurance of what awaited them there.
Joseph had every opportunity to be afraid, and the devotion names his sorrows plainly. But in each case, he acted in trust, and God protected him, Mary, and Jesus. The sixth petition captures this when we ask, through Joseph’s sorrow at the fear of Archelaus and his joy in the company of Jesus and Mary at Nazareth, that “disengaged from all fear, we may enjoy the peace of a good conscience.”
We ask not to be freed from fear but to be disengaged from it. For years I thought the goal of the spiritual life was for the fear to go away. St. Joseph taught me something different. The fear may remain. What changes is whether I am bound to it.
When the Worst Fear Comes True
I learned about fear in a hard way. When my daughter’s leukemia became terminal, the thing I had feared above every other thing was no longer a fear but a fact. The fear did not dissolve. But with St. Joseph’s help, I disengaged from it. I came to accept that in God’s infinite wisdom, my daughter’s life on this earth would end at eleven years old, and that He who had asked Joseph to trust Him in Egypt was asking me to trust Him now.
Because my worst fear had come true, every other fear lost its power. I had already walked through the valley. This is not stoicism. It is more like what the first petition asks for: “the unspeakable peace of which He is the Eternal Source.” That peace is not the absence of sorrow but the presence of Christ in the midst of it.
A Factory for Anxieties
After our daughter’s death, my wife suggested that we start a classical high school. I laughed out loud. Six months later we had begun the process. If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. It works just as well if you tell Him what you will never do.
Starting a school is like opening a factory whose only product is anxiety. Will anyone fund it? Will we find a building? Will families enroll? Will teachers apply? Each question comes with a deadline, and each deadline inexorably arrives whether or not you are ready.
Through all of it I kept praying the Seven Sorrows and Joys as a perpetual novena: nine days, then begin again. Rinse and repeat.
And my anxieties were assuaged, though not always in the way I expected. The funding came. The building was found. The families enrolled. The teachers applied.
No Idol of Earthly Affection
Not everything went smoothly. Starting a school puts a target on your back, and the most painful shots were the social ones. Friendships were strained. We found ourselves uninvited from gatherings. As I told my wife, apparently our red nose means we are not welcome at the reindeer games. It stung.
But here the fifth petition addressed what we were going through. Through St. Joseph’s sorrow at the flight into Egypt and his joy at seeing the idols of that land thrown down, we ask “that no idol of earthly affection may any longer occupy our hearts, but being like thee entirely devoted to the service of Jesus and Mary, we may live and happily die for them alone.”
I had been praying those words without applying them to our situation. Now I saw that God was taking them seriously even when I had not. The esteem of friends, the comfort of belonging, the ease of being liked: these are real goods, but they had become idols for me, and idols must fall. St. Joseph watched the gods of Egypt topple. I watched some smaller gods topple in my own heart, and it was good for my humility.
Attachment and fear are related. We fear losing what we are attached to. The devotion treats both at once by turning our eyes toward the one Treasure we cannot lose unless we choose to. The seventh petition asks that we never lose Jesus by sin, and that if we do, we may share Joseph’s eagerness in seeking Him until we find Him again.
A Plank in the Storm
Three years in, this devotion has done more for my fears and attachments than any amount of trying harder to be brave or detached. It does not ask me to be brave. It asks me to look at a man who faced enormous fears and trusted anyway, and to ask for his intercession.
If you are clinging to your own plank in a storm, or looking for one to grab onto, I commend this devotion to you. Pray it for nine days, then pray it again. In the moment, the friars off the coast of Flanders did not know the name of the young man who came to them on the water. We do. His name is St. Joseph, and he is a pilot who will never steer you wrong.
Author’s Note: You can find the full text of the novena at: https://catholicnovenaapp.com/novenas/seven-sorrows-joys-st-joseph-novena/
Image from Wikimedia Commons
