Why I Wrote a Book About St. Joseph

As a teen in high school I was unsure if I had what it took as I entered adulthood. I didn’t know what it meant to be a man, and the examples I had in my life only left me more confused. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was carrying a lot of baggage going into my senior year of high school.

Thanks be to God, I went on a Steubenville Conference that Summer. That led me to Jesus, my beautiful bride, and an entirely different trajectory of life.

Not So Happily-Ever-After

Fast forward ten years to 2016, and I’m married to my best friend, but utterly failing in my vocation. As a couple, Monica and I wasted a lot of the time we spent dating and engaged. What I mean is that we didn’t take time to cultivate the boundaries, habits, and virtues necessary for a healthy marriage before we said our vows. We kind of thought marriage was just a bigger and better engagement. This was supposed to be easy. That mindset left us struggling to share space once we were past the honeymoon period.

We had just welcomed our second son, and Monica and I were arguing and fighting about everything. She was also facing an unnamed mental illness we can now identify as postpartum depression, and I was oblivious to her needs. I was also completely in over my head being a dad. I didn’t know how to handle a two year old and a colicky new born. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I was doing it wrong. I spent the majority of my time oscillating between frustration with myself and frustration with my kids.

I wanted to serve my family better, but I didn’t know how. And I was taking out that frustration out on them. Monica, to her surprise, had married a very passive man. She would urge me to help lighten her load at home, and I wouldn’t. I didn’t know where to start, I didn’t know what she meant, and my fear of failing had me trying to ignore the problems that were festering within our marriage simply hoping they would go away.

I also didn’t know how to balance loving, disciplining, and teaching my kids. As the boys grew older, and we were preparing to welcome Gianna into our lives, I was dreading being a dad to a daughter. I knew I needed to change something, but I was clueless as to where to begin.

Enter Stay-At-Home-Dad life

Right around the time Gianna was born, Monica and I discerned career changes. I needed to pause my career and she needed to pursue teaching. In hindsight, it was one of the best decisions we ever made, and I credit where we are now as a family to the moment we made the switch.

I go into more detail how being a stay-at-home-dad changed me here. But what I don’t cover in that post is the spiritual side of what God was doing in my heart. Practically speaking, being a stay-at-home-dad taught me a lot. First, it showed all of the things Monica did on a daily basis and I learned to appreciate her so much more. Second, it taught me how to care for my young kids, and how to manage myself and my emotions while caring for THEIR EVERY SINGLE NEED EVERY MOMENT OF EVERY DAY. It was a trial-by-fire type situation, but I made it out only slightly darker than when I went in.

Most importantly, being a stay-at-home-dad, changed my spiritual perspective on being a father and a husband. Up until that point, I had no clue how to lead my family. I never had the example of servant leadership in family life to show me how a husband and father leads his family. So, naturally, I was drowning in that department. But my time home changed all of that.

My SAHD (stay-at-home-dad) life started with playdates in the park with the kids from our friend group, but that quickly evolved to daily mass every morning with them as well. My time at daily mass began to really mold me into the leader my family needed. God slowly revealed to me the wounds I was still carrying around, and how those wounds were preventing me from leading and loving my family well. It’s during this time that I began to devour the writings of St. John Paul the Great. I suddenly had a moment in the middle of my day where I could read for 30-40 minutes (some people call it nap time). Reading during nap time led to reading in the mornings and evenings. Eventually, I finished, and loved, Love and Responsibility. Plus I read Theology of the Body for the first time. Then I began working through his JP2’s Papal writings. And here is where God dropped truth bombs.

While healing my wounds, I was still struggling with what a holy husband and father looked like. I did not grow up with an example to emulate, and felt directionless. That’s when God have me a tangible ideal to pursue:

“Love for his wife as mother of their children and love for the children themselves are for the man the natural way of understanding and fulfilling his own fatherhood. Above all where social and cultural conditions so easily encourage a father to be less concerned with his family or at any rate less involved in the work of education, efforts must be made to restore socially the conviction that the place and task of the father in and for the family is of unique and irreplaceable importance. As experience teaches, the absence of a father causes psychological and moral imbalance and notable difficulties in family relationships, as does, in contrary circumstances, the oppressive presence of a father, especially where there still prevails the phenomenon of "machismo," or a wrong superiority of male prerogatives which humiliates women and inhibits the development of healthy family relationships. In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family.” -St. John Paul (Familiaris Consortio)

Ok, so there it was.

That’s what I was supposed to do as a father and husband. That’s what I needed to pursue. But, now that I had the ideal, I asked the question, “how do I get there?”

How do I go from where I am to where I want to be in leading my family?

So I finished Familiaris Consortio, and moved to what is now one of my favorite works from St. John Paul the Great.

Guardian of the Redeemer

Reading “Familiaris Consortio”, led me to reading St. John Paul’s Apostolic Exhortation on St. Joseph “Redemptoris Custos” or “Guardian of the Redeemer.”

This exhortation changed how I saw St. Joseph and how I saw my role as husband and father. My vocation transformed and became the means in which I served the Lord. As St. John Paul wrote,

“St. Joseph was called by God to serve the person and mission of Jesus directly through the exercise of his fatherhood. […] The Gospels clearly describe the fatherly responsibility of Joseph toward Jesus. For salvation-which comes through the humanity of Jesus-is realized in actions which are an everyday part of family life.“

The way to live out my fatherhood in the service of God was to follow the model provided by St. Joseph.

This led to hours of meditating and contemplating St. Joseph and how he loved and served his family. And it led to tangible ways I needed to love and serve my family.

After finishing the Apostolic Exhortation, I entrusted my role as husband and father to Jesus through St. Joseph. This was in 2018, before Consecration to St. Joseph became so popular. St. John Paul the Great encouraged Consecration to St. Joseph over 30 years ago:

“Commending ourselves, then, to the protection of him to whose custody God "entrusted his greatest and most precious treasures," let us at the same time learn from him how to be servants of the "economy of salvation." May St. Joseph become for all of us an exceptional teacher in the service of Christ's saving mission, a mission which is the responsibility of each and every member of the Church: husbands and wives, parents, those who live by the work of their hands or by any other kind of work, those called to the contemplative life and those called to the apostolate.”

Entrusting myself to St. Joseph changed the way I loved my bride, loved my kids, and how I led my family. God filled my need for a guide in fatherhood by providing me His own earthly guide.

Change of Plans

I began writing down my own reflections and insights as I prayed through the Gospels and other Papal documents that focused on St. Joseph. My hope, three years ago, was to one day write a book about this devotion in order to help other people find what I did through St. Joseph. But as quickly as I found myself a stay-at-home-dad, I found myself jumping right back into my old field of work on March 19th 2019.

Returning to work paused my aspirations to write the book.

I continued to grow as a husband and father. There were, and still are, plenty of bumps in the road as I try to lead my family through serving them. But I know that if it wasn’t for my time as a stay-at-home-dad, and the example and devotion to St. Joseph, that I would not be the kind of husband and father I am today.

That is why in the year of St. Joseph, I decided to finally finish my book.

The title of the book is Go To Joseph: 10 Day Preparation for Consecration to St. Joseph. This book is not specifically for husbands and father, but I believe it would be of great benefit to them. This book, and the devotion to St. Joseph, can be transformational for anyone. St. Joseph takes all that we know and experience of God, and shows us how to live by it well.

So if you’re interested in another resource to help you Go to Joseph, click HERE and learn more!

Verso L’alto - Renzo