Reflections on the Holy Family: Did St. Joseph Take the Night Shift?

In the months leading up to the birth of our first child, my husband and I decided that I would be the one to get up for the nighttime feedings. In fact, we didn’t even need to have a conversation about it. I already knew a night shift was a sacrifice I couldn’t expect my husband to make. That’s not to say he wasn’t there for me during certain nights when I really needed support, but for the long-term, he just couldn’t function without nighttime sleep. The trade-off was that when he woke up in the mornings, he would make breakfast and then let me go up to bed to catch up on some z’s.

Similar dilemmas and compromises are frequent in a marriage, and I’m sure it was no different in the relationship of St. Joseph and Our Lady.

Recently, while reflecting on the Joyful Mysteries, the memories of my sleep-deprived days with a newborn came flooding back. They were immediately replaced with an image of St. Joseph telling a tired Mary to go back to sleep as he stayed up with their crying infant. I allowed my imagination to follow this saintly father to a moonlit window where he gently rocked his son and sang to him Hebrew lullabies.

Sometimes porcelain statues and framed paintings can be a trip up in our spiritual progression. We look to them as reminders of the sanctity we should be striving for, and yet are puzzled why their serene disposition and angelic expressions are not relatable. We take them at face value and then don’t understand why we feel hollow.

But don’t stop short of wonder, my friends.

Scripture gives us little insight into what the Holy Family’s life looked like. Besides the major plot points of the annunciation, the nativity, the flight into Egypt, and the finding of Jesus in the temple, there’s a lot missing on the timeline until Jesus began his public ministry. So, what exactly happened during that time?

I’ll tell you.

Our joys were their same joys

Our struggles were their same struggles.

I think back to how my husband and I were new parents in a new area, removed from our family support systems and friendships. Didn’t Mary and Joseph have similar circumstances living as Hebrews and refugees in Egypt, a pagan, foreign country? Did Mary have any friends? Or did the locals think she was odd? Could her family come and visit her?

They obviously had it much worse than my husband and I ever did.

In Luke 2:48 Mary admits to Jesus how anxious she and his father were while he was lost for three days. Don’t you think a more accurate portrait would be our sorrowful mother sobbing on the shoulder of St. Joseph the previous night?

Doesn’t that statue look more life-like now?

While it’s true scripture does give us few stories on the life of the Holy Family, I believe we don’t have to look much farther than our own reality of family life to fill in the missing pieces.