Man Who Followed His Dreams
I was born in São José hospital in Rio de Janeiro. It was a fairly difficult birth, and my mother dedicated me to São José, asking him to help me to survive. José – or Joseph – has become a cornerstone of my life. Every year since 1987, the year after my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, I have given a party in his honour, on 19 March. I invite friends and other honest, hard-working people, and before we have supper, we pray for all those who try to preserve the dignity of what they do. We pray, too, for those who are unemployed and with no prospects for the future.
In my little introduction to the prayer, I like to remind people that the word ‘dream’ appears in the New Testament only five times, and that four out of those five times the word is used in reference to Joseph the carpenter. In all of these cases, he is always being persuaded by an angel to do exactly the opposite of what he was planning to do.
The angel asks him not to abandon his wife, even though she is pregnant. Joseph could say something along the lines of, ‘What will the neighbours think?’ But he goes back home and believes in the revealed word.
The angel tells him to go into Egypt. His answer couldwell have been: ‘I’ve got a carpentry business here and regular customers, I can’t just abandon it all.’ And yet he gathers his things together and heads off into the unknown.
The angel asks him to return from Egypt. Joseph could have thought: ‘What, now, when I’ve just managed to create a settled life again, and when I’ve got a family to support?’
Joseph goes against what common sense tells him to do and follows his dreams. He knows that he has a destiny to fulfil, which is the destiny of all men on this planet – to protect and support his family. Like millions of anonymous Josephs, he tries to carry out this task, even if it means doing things that are beyond his comprehension.
Later, both his wife and one of his children are transformed into the cornerstones of Christianity. The third pillar of the family, the labourer, is only remembered in nativity scenes at Christmas, or by those who feel a special devotion to him – as I do, and as does Leonardo Boff, for whom I wrote the preface to his book on the carpenter.
I give below part of an article by the writer Carlos Heitor Cony, which I came across on the internet:
People are sometimes surprised that, given my declared agnosticism and my refusal to accept the idea of a philosophical, moral or religious God, I am, nevertheless, devoted to certain saints in our traditional calendar. God is too distant a concept or entity for my uses or even for my needs. Saints, on the other hand, with whom I share the same clay foundations, deserve more than my admiration, they deserve my devotion.
St Joseph is one of them. The Gospels do not record a single word spoken by him, only gestures and one explicit reference: vir justus – a just man. Since he was a carpenter and not a judge, one must deduce that Joseph was, above all else, good. A good carpenter, a good husband, a good father to the boy who would divide the history of the world.
Beautiful words from Cony. And yet I often read such aberrant statements as: ‘Jesus went to India to learn from the teachers in the Himalayas.’ I believe that any man can transform the task given him by life into something sacred, and Jesus learned while Joseph, the just man, taught him to make tables, chairs, and beds.
In my imagination, I like to think that the table at which Christ consecrated the bread and the wine would have been made by Joseph, because it must have been the work of some anonymous carpenter, one who earned his living by the sweat of his brow, and who, precisely because of that, allowed miracles to be performed.
The Importance of the Cat in Meditation
W hen I wrote Veronika Decides to Die , a book about madness, I was forced to ask myself how many of the things we do are really
I was born in São José hospital in Rio de Janeiro. It was a fairly difficult birth, and my mother dedicated me to São José, asking him to help me to survive. José – or Joseph – has become a cornerstone of my life. Every year since 1987, the year after my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, I have given a party in his honour, on 19 March. I invite friends and other honest, hard-working people, and before we have supper, we pray for all those who try to preserve the dignity of what they do. We pray, too, for those who are unemployed and with no prospects for the future.
In my little introduction to the prayer, I like to remind people that the word ‘dream’ appears in the New Testament only five times, and that four out of those five times the word is used in reference to Joseph the carpenter. In all of these cases, he is always being persuaded by an angel to do exactly the opposite of what he was planning to do.
The angel asks him not to abandon his wife, even though she is pregnant. Joseph could say something along the lines of, ‘What will the neighbours think?’ But he goes back home and believes in the revealed word.
The angel tells him to go into Egypt. His answer couldwell have been: ‘I’ve got a carpentry business here and regular customers, I can’t just abandon it all.’ And yet he gathers his things together and heads off into the unknown.
The angel asks him to return from Egypt. Joseph could have thought: ‘What, now, when I’ve just managed to create a settled life again, and when I’ve got a family to support?’
Joseph goes against what common sense tells him to do and follows his dreams. He knows that he has a destiny to fulfil, which is the destiny of all men on this planet – to protect and support his family. Like millions of anonymous Josephs, he tries to carry out this task, even if it means doing things that are beyond his comprehension.
Later, both his wife and one of his children are transformed into the cornerstones of Christianity. The third pillar of the family, the labourer, is only remembered in nativity scenes at Christmas, or by those who feel a special devotion to him – as I do, and as does Leonardo Boff, for whom I wrote the preface to his book on the carpenter.
I give below part of an article by the writer Carlos Heitor Cony, which I came across on the internet:
People are sometimes surprised that, given my declared agnosticism and my refusal to accept the idea of a philosophical, moral or religious God, I am, nevertheless, devoted to certain saints in our traditional calendar. God is too distant a concept or entity for my uses or even for my needs. Saints, on the other hand, with whom I share the same clay foundations, deserve more than my admiration, they deserve my devotion.
St Joseph is one of them. The Gospels do not record a single word spoken by him, only gestures and one explicit reference: vir justus – a just man. Since he was a carpenter and not a judge, one must deduce that Joseph was, above all else, good. A good carpenter, a good husband, a good father to the boy who would divide the history of the world.
Beautiful words from Cony. And yet I often read such aberrant statements as: ‘Jesus went to India to learn from the teachers in the Himalayas.’ I believe that any man can transform the task given him by life into something sacred, and Jesus learned while Joseph, the just man, taught him to make tables, chairs, and beds.
In my imagination, I like to think that the table at which Christ consecrated the bread and the wine would have been made by Joseph, because it must have been the work of some anonymous carpenter, one who earned his living by the sweat of his brow, and who, precisely because of that, allowed miracles to be performed.
The Importance of the Cat in Meditation
W hen I wrote Veronika Decides to Die , a book about madness, I was forced to ask myself how many of the things we do are really
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