JOSEPH, JESUS' STEP-FATHER

I’ve been asked to ponder Joseph, the step-father of Jesus, as a figure capable of restoring qualities of fatherhood that would help us in our scrambled times. The rules of work and relationship seem to have gotten into a new juxtaposition that is destructive to us all. We are confused about who is and who is not a father, what a father is supposed to do, how we should think about good and bad fathers.

Joseph is a figure of the Gospels, which are the enunciation of a new religion focused on resurrection. The Ultimate Father for the first time promises to restore life after death to everyone who believes in His Son. The Old Testament is patriarchal at a particular point in history. The patriarch who had been the head of the tribe (think Afghanistan) was just at that period transitioning into being the head of a family and the mayor of a town (think Tony Blair -- oh, all right, think Corleone). A man’s duty was changing from hunting and fighting to accumulating and managing. Sacrifices were changing from blood (even sons) to bread and wine from the field and vineyard.

In the New Testament Jesus tries to get these men to have compassion on the weak, the poor, the dispossessed, the outsiders. Otherwise the fathers may get so focused on protecting their crops, their homes and their walled cities that they become corrupt. Yet to survive as agriculturalists, they must be hoarders. They must save enough seeds for the next crop (resurrecting the plants) and they must teach and protect their sons because that’s how the life of the family is continued (resurrected generation by generation). This pattern continues today in Valier. I don’t get so much the feeling that individuals yearn to be immortal or resurrected, as they seem to want their family and their land to continue on into the future. And yet prosperity appears to demand that the sons must become educated and that means leaving for the city. Not just one new lifetime job but a sequence in order to follow the job market. Their lives will be full of trade-offs and adaptations, always moving -- hopefully up. Probably in intimate relationships as well as work.

In order to certify Jesus as the Redeemer who was predicted in the Old Testament, his provenance had to be stipulated begat by begat, because he had to descend from Joseph. His father, of course, was God, but Jewish heritage is traced through the mother. Yet she had to be married and the tradition of Gods is that they don’t bother with weddings. So it is probable that Joseph the husband of Mary who stood by her through her pregnancy, delivery and at least the first twelve years of Jesus’ life, was largely developed in retrospect. Our understanding of the figure mostly responds to three crucial aspects of fathers: their family roots and locations (Jesus had to collect on all the predictions of a coming savior), their conferral of legitimacy (otherwise Mary would have been stoned to death for having a baby out of wedlock), and their economic viability. Joseph is described as a “tekton.” A technician or craftsman. This is usually translated as an artisan, a carpenter rather than a peasant or a prince.

He’s pictured as an old man, a widower, so that we’d not think about him going to bed with the mother of Jesus, though Jesus is described as having brothers that might not have been metaphorical, maybe from Joseph having an earlier marriage. The rather lovely story about how Joseph was chosen to be Mary’s husband has the walking staffs of all the widowers collected and laid out together. To indicate God’s choice, Joseph’s walking stick burst into flower, another sign of dead wood being resurrected. (Of course, an artist might like to think of resurrecting wood in a carving, but no one suggests that Joseph was an artist.)

It occurs to me that not all men are suited to being townsmen or even carpenters, though my agriculturalist grandparents were also carpenters, one of them capable of paneling a finely-finished library for a modest mansion in South Dakota and the other a contractor whose family built the big Dutch barns of the Washington dairy country that have now collapsed of old age. My sculptor ex-husband did a lot of building but in the end his heart was out hunting. I mean, I think a lot of men never really made the transition from hunting to farming and towns, never accepted having a patriarch boss them around to make them into images of their fathers. Maybe these are the men who can teach today’s youngsters who must leave the ag world (some call it God’s country) to become techies roaming the globe from contract to contract, free-lancing as hunters did, like artists, writers, musicians inventing survival all over again. We know that Jesus would approve -- it was, after all, his lifestyle. But what would Joseph tell these people?

It appears that Joseph is no longer on the scene by the time Jesus is crucified. A different Joseph (of Arimathea) has to supply His burial tomb so He could be Resurrected out of it. Every wandering artist needs a patron. Of course, there’s nothing to prevent one’s patron from being one’s father. But in the end maybe the figure of Joseph is more of a comfort for the patron than for the dead prophet. The trouble with many charities is that they become all about the patrons: we multiply the image of Mother Theresa instead of looking at the dying paupers. And we are distracted from analyzing the social conditions that create dying paupers in the first place. There are societies for the veneration of Joseph.

It’s interesting and even useful to look at the humanness of Jesus through our own lives of relationships and to see the relevance to us. But in the end perhaps we would be more true to the issues if we observed the Islamic prohibition on images, which always lead to the problem of misplaced concreteness, taking metaphor as real and insisting that real-ness means what WE know and not what the other guy lives through. The consequence is quarrels about what race, how tall, what gender. We must not reduce Joseph to a little figure in a dimestore creche. Or anyone else either.

FOR A BOY CALLED FLARE WHO IS IN MORTAL COMBAT WITH HIV

What can you do when you’re facing death and that death is your own? Of course, we’re ALL facing death, we ALL die, and some people will say life itself is the illusion and we should just shrug and go on. But what if you’re not a very good Buddhist.

First of all, there are strategies that I would NOT recommend.

1. Denial.

2. Crawling under the bed to hide among the lint bunnies.

3. Crying and whining.

4. Blaming.

5. Asking why, why, why or what does it mean.

6. Begging someone to make it better.

The religious strategy (prayer, meditation, asceticism, penance) might work for you but if it does, you don’t need my advice.

This is what I recommend, but not all of them at once and only an angle that really works for you. This stuff is highly personal, even though death is universal. (The only reason an HIV virus itself doesn’t die is because it was never alive in the first place -- it’s only replicable.)

1. Personify death, the way Ingmar Bergman did (“You old cloaked death’s head, I will make chess moves that keep you at bay!") or the way the Westerns did (“Draw, you sunnavabitch! I’m gonna plug you full of holest!”). Talk to Death, tell him/her you know who else he’s scythed down and how you hate him for it and will not buckle in front of him.

2. Personify the universe and ask to be forever part of it, which is a request bound to be granted since once we exist we can never un-exist, no matter how dead we are, because our impact on time and place will go on down the centuries like the reverberation of a struck gong. Even if it was modest, even if it was only occupying space, your body had breathed in molecules, transformed them and breathed them out. That’s not even mentioning food. Think of how that monkey sold at market for someone’s dinner has now changed the fates of entire populations.

3. Stiffen up and play a role for the sake of your comrades. “Take away that blindfold! I don’t need it. Gimme a squib of marijuana -- I don’t want your tobacco.” Head high, shoulders square, defiant and gallant. And what else could you do while you still can? Write a letter? That counts.

4. Think of a hero (book, movie, real life person, mythology) and do what he would do. (“She” will also work. What would Sheena, Queen of the Jungle do?) When I get a little closer to the end, I intend to channel Sean Connery. At present, I’m settling for Christopher Hitchens who is meeting his prospect of death with amazing moxie for an atheist -- but wait, just what the heck IS he at this point?

Nothing wrong with “being Tim.” What would Timo do? What would Timothee say? You know, of course. Just got to ask yourself to bring up his image in your head.

5. Start with your own deep identity. “I am Flare!! I burn brighter than a volcano! Deep inside is a core of magma that can light up eternity and consume small towns! Death is an inconvenience. I am a comet in your sky!”

6. Invent the other side of death. My mother, dying, said, “I hope the next planet is as much fun as this one was.” She was faking it, trying to get us to laugh, and it worked. If reincarnation turns out to be a true story, what will you come back as? Tell us, show us. Make us laugh.

7. Get someone to help you by sitting beside you, maybe asking questions or maybe even holding your hand or even all of you, if necessary. Then sort your guts and plumb your heart. Tell it out, testify, witness, story, narrate, sing, draw, act it.

8. If you’re really tough, you could just write it out alone. But then you could write out what you feel, leave it until the next day or change colors of ink or turn the journal upside down, and then answer yourself. What would you say to yourself if you were someone else?

9. Never give up hope. Lots of people were told they were going to die and then they didn’t, which was awkward since they had given away all their clothes and had failed to pay the rent.

10. Death is not what hurts. Life hurts. When you get to death, you’ve won. You’re THERE. Not that there’s any particular hurry, esp. if you have comrades who love you.

Here’s a prayer. Sorta. It’s for me, but you can use it.

“Hey Cosmos! Hey Dark Matter! Hey Wormholes and Strings and whatever else you’ve got lying around out there in space! Pay attention! Here I am in this corner of the universe with my tiny fleshly life. I know that I’m basically a stack of muck worth a few dollars as chemicals but temporarily organized into something capable of sustaining a flame of consciousness that dances in my head and a drumhead heart that beats in my chest. There’s nothing wrong with temporary, but I’d like it to be a long temporary -- if you don’t mind.

“When my flame goes out and my muck drops to join the ground and the beat of my song has been silenced, know this: I was here. I counted. I saw the world and parts of it were good, parts of it were bad. I laughed and cried and fucked and kissed and did all that stuff. I saw the sun come up in the morning and go back down at night and I knew it wasn’t really gone -- just the other side of the planet. When I’m ‘over,’ think of me as being on the ‘other side of the planet.’

“Hey Rings of Uranus! Hey Pluto even if you aren’t a planet anymore! Hey Double Stars and Red Meanie Stars and planets with or without life. I was here. Once Time lets you happen, there you are -- always a part of Time. Time is forever. Don’t believe me? Well, I’m coming to see about that! Make some more space!”