To Egypt.....(And Back) #IamJoseph

* Jesus pray for me
* Saint Joseph pray for me


+---------To Egypt... (and Back); Saint Joseph's Thoughts Before Leaving for Egypt

I remember the reenactments
when I was younger, our sheep as
chariots, my sister would wrap one of Mom’s
old dusty tunics atop her head (grinning), a
makeshift Nemes granting
instantaneous exaltation from dust to glory-
this miraculous metamorphosis before
charmed siblings’ eyes:
she escorted from Nazarene penury
to Egypt’s most posh palace to reign over
us with an iron fist-
a bent scalpum from my father
as the ornamental uraeus protruding from
her tiny forehead,
that slithering serpent of rust that made
the rest of us squeal when chased.
Yet as I got older, upon learning this once
enchanting land had been “cursed”
by my forbearers, its memory extrapolated
with more and more of my adult foreboding,
I exchanged the glory stories of youth
with gore, the admiration of jewels
and pyramids for disdain
at years and years of our rampant abuse
with whips and fists
that necessitated divine plagues,
the harshest of penalties for a people
born with the hardest of hearts.
But now it is my heart that needs to be mollified,
counseled through the nebulae that
envelops it: My wife birthed a son but
I don’t yet fully understand it or him, this
bright luminous personage routinely appears
before me in my dreams rustling me
from sleep, wildly gesticulating his dire
pronouncements of death at the hands
of Herod if I don’t go,
if I don’t flee the only hometown I have
ever known, and trust in God’s provision
for resources and energy I surely don’t have.
I don’t even know how long I should stay
(my large visiting Angel, that I hope is an
Angel and not my own subconscious
mind moralizing to me into paranoia,
didn’t specify this).
I think of my sister often these days,
imagining her playfully scowled face,
chuckling and musing
to myself that the real Pharaoh
couldn’t possibly hold a candle to her tyranny.
Tomorrow I leave for Egypt,
a lamb tentatively treading into the unknown.
I pray I find my answers there-
that maybe these fears have been sent
from above to drive me from dying into
living fully,
from lethargy and despair
into spiritual vitality....visions of
me beneath the Sphinx
playing with my Son,
trusting and believing that in the end,
all will be okay. (That from beneath the Sphinx,
one day,
I will rise and return).


--- Matthew 2:13 And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.