Father Andrew Doze

Mar212023

Joseph, teacher of the delicate transfer

“Love consists not in feeling great things,” says St. John of the Cross, “but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved,”

In some way, one must develop the habit of going from a mental activity, corresponding to our clear awareness, to what we feel, what we mentally recall, imagine, sense in our body or in our psyche, to a spiritual life where everything is apparently abolished.

This transfer is not easy: it is but a variation on the theme which is central to our study, the descent from Jerusalem to Nazareth; Jerusalem, the image of mental life as “religious” as one could wish, as rich as one could hope, and Nazareth, the image of a spiritual life, detached, silent, obscure. No, this transfer is not easy but, fortunately, as the angel said, “Nothing is impossible with God” (cf Lk 1:37).

When one senses his presence, thanks to Mary, Joseph appears to me to be the master of this delicate transfer.

People will perhaps be surprised to know that I do not often address prayers to Joseph, while I am deeply aware that I pray only in him. I do think of him (what could my thinking be focused on?) but he teaches me, precisely, the art of not thinking “in the human way,” a way which so often saddened Jesus when he was with his apostles (cf Mt 16:23).

Let us consider an example: the more someone is dear to us, the less we have to think of that person. We must reach him on a spiritual level whether he is present or absent, and not through imagination, daydreams or a set of impressions we interpose. The mental faculty must be at the service of the operation with the greatest discretion possible: it must not act as a screen, capturing, our arresting, and all the more so, distorting. We must realize that unless a kind of miracle takes place, things are bound to be so.

The human mental faculty is intrusive and, moreover, it is falsified most of the time, except in a tiny child and in those who end up by being like children after a long period of purification. Never were Jesus’ words so true: “No one is good but God alone!” (Lk 18:19). Human imagination, memory, feelings and the rest are a field of darnel dramatically mixed up with the good grain and it is preferable that we leave it so, as Jesus says. The more the affective aspect of our nature is unleased in what we call love or its opposites (anger, indignation, jealousy, fear, etc.), the more the mental aspect becomes delirious, tyrannical, dangerous, the more it risks falsifying objective reality.

What shall we say about fixed ideas, obsessions and other analogous difficulties which are so dramatically widespread?

Joseph teaches us the supreme art of dying to our mental life in order to allow ourselves to be born again to a way of perfection which is akin to that of Mary and is only remotely similar to what we could have known previously. Let us, for some time, try the experiment of never deliberately recalling the human being we love very much; we will then begin to realize that love comes from much beyond, from a much greater depth than our human heart alone, our feelings, our judgment, whatever qualities they may have. We will experience a freedom so new, an insight, a loving force so ingenious that we will no longer be able to deny that all comes from elsewhere.

St. John of the Cross, this accomplished son of the Carmel of the house of Mary and Joseph, had said as much but it was difficult to believe him.

“Take no heed of the creatures if thou wilt keep the image of God clearly and simply in thy soul, but empty thy spirit of them, and withdraw far from them, and thou shalt walk in the Divine light, for God is not like to the creatures.”

‘Saint Joseph: Shadow of the Father’ written by Father Andrew Doze

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Jun302016

Now I lay me down to sleep

In order to give a perfectly concrete turn to the process of learning to which we must subject ourselves, nothing is more instructive than to meditate on the first and the most elementary of these three forms of death, the art of lending ourselves to sleep.

…“to sleep is to let things go”.  Man let’s go his usual mental experience for the sake of an interest of prime importance: that of recuperating in depth, of allowing God to restore him.

….  Like Jesus sleeping in the middle of the storm, sleep expresses a perfect trust in God who “neither slumbers nor sleeps” (Psalm 121) and who takes care of us all the more sense we let him do so.  That is why the Lord makes the harvest of the just man grow, instructs Joseph about his secret wishes during his sleep, suggests a totally dedramatized image of death for the death of the just (“the girl is not dead but sleeping”—Matthew 9:24, the same for Lazarus).  But one must go further.  The effort which the one seeking sleep must make when he does not easily drop off to sleep, in contrast with the happy mortal of the psalm who “lies down and sleeps” right away, is a typical example.  It is, as it were, the model of full spiritual effort. –Father Andrew Doze “Saint Joseph Shadow of the Father”

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Jun282016

Reinvigoration

There are two limits to human attention: that of the man who falls asleep, yielding himself to the biological wisdom hidden in the innermost recesses of his being and which alone can restore him in depth; and that of the man who touches the edges of ‘ecstasy’ because he has caught a glimpse of beauty, of love, of true prayer.  When man forgets himself to become attention, this other mysterious being, “the Holy Spirit, intercedes with sights too deep for words, praying for what man does not know how to ask” as the Apostle says. –Andrew Doze “Saint Joseph Shadow of the Father”

St Joseph, dally greeter

St Joseph, dally greeter

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Mar192016

Breathing out Joseph breathing in Mary

…Joseph is in charge of making known to all humans: the art of eliminating—eliminating idle thoughts, not by fighting them off but by gently slipping out of their hold, of their implacable logic, as Joseph slipped away from the clutch of Herod’s soldiers.  To fight against evil thoughts, when teaching in the temple, is the best way of making them still more obsessive, more dangerous.  Let us leave the task of facing up to the forces of evil to St Michael; with Joseph who is but a human being as we are, let us learn the precious art of evasion.  It is the art practiced by Jesus at the time of his first confrontation with Satan.

How can one escape the evidence of pride which underscores the superiority of this one, the insignificance of that one, going exactly from one to the other to arrive in both cases to the same inflexibility?  How can one escape from the morbid suggestions of the senses, from attraction for alcohol, drugs or very simply, from the fatal return of fixed ideas?  How can one escape this obsessive past when the Devil easily finds ways of accusing his unfortunate victims, by night and by day, before the throne of God?  Too often, this victim in question agrees with these accusations and thinks that no one else but God could stir up so many truths.

If we learned to practice interior silence with the one who does not speak and who is in charge of teaching it to us, we will be amazed to see mountain’s slide away and disappear…..

What does not come from God, as all masters of spirituality have noted, from Saint Catherine of Siena to St John of the Cross, is often brilliant, inspiring at first, then becomes a source of uneasiness, sadness, perturbation.  What comes from God is often quite bitter, exercises little attraction at first but quickly becomes a source of profound peace…..

We must find the ways of silence in ourselves beginning as we have said in passing, with breathing: to breathe calmly while becoming aware of the symbolic aspects of the operation is, so to speak, the spiritual initiative, the first form of intelligent obedience of the creature to its Creator.  To breathe out with Joseph, (the patron saint of the art of expiring, of eliminating, of dying) in order to breathe in the same way with Mary (the woman inhabited by the Spirit, source of all “inspiration,” divine breath).  Breathing thus experienced becomes like the balancing pole of the tightrope walker, which allows him to move forward on his rope without falling.  Breathing is the only psychic reality on which we have a direct hold to help us cross certain difficult passage where we run the risk of panicking, getting lost, and allowing ourselves to be alienated (with the complicity of the powers of darkness to which one must not give the slightest importance, but whose harmful effects it would be predicted list to ignore).  —Father Andrew Doze ‘Saint Joseph Shadow of the Father’

Joseph

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Feb122016

Ode to Joseph / Joseph and Lent

To learn to live in Nazareth means to discover again the secrets that the prophets of Israel like Isiah, for instance, suggested: “For thus says the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. But you refused” (Is 30:15).

Conversion, tearing away from the falsified world of evil and deceit is Joseph’s specialty, Joseph who makes us “die” to the folly of sin. The calm state of the obedient and inhabited heart is that of Mary subjected to her husband. The perfect trust in the love of the Father is what Jesus lived for us. –Father Andrew Doze “Joseph: Shadow of the Father”

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Dec302015

Two doors: Joseph and Mary

All is said here: this world of God, the antithesis of hell, is Joseph’s world.  It has two doors: the first, the entrance door, the one on the street, is entrusted to Joseph.  It allows one to leave a complicated, confused, hostile and dangerous world behind.  The other is the mysterious door, Mary’s door, the ancient devotion called the “Gate of Heaven,” through which Jesus enters into the world, in a very special way.  Everything happens as if the Lord were presenting himself between these two doors (Joseph and Mary) in the same way that the eternal Father presents himself, according to St Irenaeus, between “his two hands which are the Son and the Spirit.”  The Son imitates the Father; he also has two hands: Joseph by whom he pulls us away from the ambiguous world, this Babylon where people think they all speak the same language while no one understands his brother and Mary, by whom the Son inaugurates the new world, that of Pentecost, where each one speaks his own language, where each one is respected in his own uniqueness, yet everyone understands everyone else!  We must go through the first door so that the Spirit of the Father who comes through the second door might reveal the Son to us (cf Luke 10:22).  “No one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God” (1 Cor 2:11).  Andrew Doze “Joseph: Shadow of the Father”

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Dec262015

Fathers

Hospice inspires with heart wrenching love. I spent a subtle Christmas evening with a patient and his daughter. Arriving in the room, I was surprised to find two beds, one occupied by a young man and my obvious patient, a large African- American man. I would learn the man stood over six foot five inches tall, a Cleveland high school basketball star from the 50s. It turns out that what I assumed was a young man sharing the room was the patient’s daughter, asleep in the bed, choosing to spend her Christmas break from graduate studies with her father. She woke suddenly introducing herself, apologizing for falling asleep. The young lady overwhelmed me with a display of love and tender care that had to be witnessed. I was stunned, silently praying, providing a presence and witness as the daughter poured forth everything she could to bring comfort to her dying father. She held his hands, stroked, his forehead, rested her hands upon his heaving chest, talking softly yet with strength and determination to him, absorbing her entire being into bring peace to her father. The patient was aware, eyes open, fixated upon his daughter with a depth of love that only declares glory upon God. To be so close to such immense love imprints a lasting impression. The time I spent with the patient, I talked softly, reassuring him, imploring the fruits of his life were good for his daughter was amazing. He smiled with his eyes, tears coming forth. I will spend Sunday afternoon with the patient and his daughter.

Enlightened minds know that silence will be the language of heaven. Already on earth it is the condition for essential communication: “One word spoke the Father, which word was His Son, and this word he speaks ever in eternal silence, and in silence it must be heard by the soul.”

That is why the Psalm points out that language of heaven, both day and night, is a silent language, “there is no speech….heard” (Psalm 19:3)

To find again something of this hidden language, to communicate beyond words, is to find again the secret of the Holy Family; it is to escape from a multitude of misunderstandings, of complications, even of illnesses. It is open to oneself to unknown possibilities of intellectual, poetic, expressions of love. That is why St John of the Cross points out: “That which we most need in order to make progress is to be silent before the great God, with the desire and with the tongue, for the language that He best hears is that of silent love.” Andrew Doze, “Joseph: Shadow of the Father”

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