My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me.

I adore you with profound reverence.

I ask your pardon for my sins and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful.

My immaculate mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

We have just invoked St. Joseph as our Father and Lord. Those words have to give us a special

excitement here as we get ready for the great feast day of St. Joseph. They have to mean a lot to us

in a very special way because St. Joseph, who is a hero for us,

gives us such a marvelous example of strength, of resilience, of faith, ultimately of fidelity.

Each one of us is called to be a source of solidity for our family,

for our neighborhood, our church, our society.

And so during this time of prayer, we can turn to St. Joseph

and ask him to give us a double portion of his fidelity.

In one sense could strike us as a little bit odd

that St. Joseph occupies such a lofty space,

simply because we know so little. He appears so little in the New Testament.

And yet we know that he was a source of solidity for the Holy Family. In our prayer,

we can fill in the gaps with our imagination. We can think, for example, of the difficulties

that St. Joseph had to face. And we have to make a special effort to use our imagination

because the problem is that we know how those situations turned out.

We can only begin to imagine what St. Joseph experienced

when he was told that his fiancé was expecting a child

in those days of uncertainty, of agony, really,

...