Sick Pilgrim
This post is part of a year-long series for the Year of St. Joseph. Read the post for January here and the post for February here.
This March, we mark the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration that the SARs-CoV-2 virus had spread into an official pandemic. In the Catholic Church we also recognize this March as the month of St. Joseph, who is known as the Patron Saint of Workers. The 19th has been his feast day across the Universal Church since 1570. And, this past December, Pope Francis released Patris Corde, his Apostolic Letter on St. Joseph written in light of the pandemic, and declared the current year, from December 8, 2020 through December 8, 2021, as the Year of St. Joseph. Francis writes he desired,
“to do so…during these months of pandemic, when we experienced, amid the crisis, how “our lives are woven together and sustained by ordinary people, people often overlooked. People who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines, or on the latest television show, yet in these very days are surely shaping the decisive events of our history… storekeepers and supermarket workers, cleaning personnel, caregivers, transport workers, men and women working to provide essential services and public safety…exercise[ing] patience and offer[ing] hope, taking care to spread not panic, but shared responsibility.”
Francis’ letter focuses on St. Joseph in his role as a father: tender and loving; obedient; accepting; creatively courageous; a working father and a father in the shadows, highlighting the attributes of St. Joseph in pandemic times. A viewpoint that focuses on how we should approach our work with attitudes of patience and hope, responsibility, steadiness, and pride. Pride in honest labor that provides essential services to others: operating public transportation, cleaning offices, businesses, and hospitals, working in ensuring the delivery and maintenance of utilities as well as the manufacture and distribution of food, medicines, and essentials.
What I don’t see is much attention paid to how we can apply St. Joseph’s attributes to our interactions with essential workers. Some people reading this may be classified as essential, working as cashiers, truck drivers, or laboring in the agricultural and food sectors. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that many of those essential workers are too busy trying to keep a roof over their family’s heads, food in their stomachs, and keep the utilities on, to read Apostolic Letters or blog posts about St. Joseph and his attributes. If those of us who have the luck to be able to work from home are suffering, exhausted, frightened, and have been running on empty, physically and emotionally, for months, imagine how it must be for essential workers. It’s difficult to practice “patience, judgement, persistence, and honesty” when you’re homeschooling your children using a wifi hot spot the school district has provided by parking a bus in your neighborhood, then going to work where there is little ability for social distancing or adequate personal protective equipment, be it in a meatpacking plant, supermarket, factory, or warehouse.
So, instead of working on applying St. Joseph’s attributes to our behavior in our attitude towards our own work, how do we apply it to our attitudes towards essential workers themselves? Using Patris Corde as our template, I think we can break it down into manageable, relatively painless, steps.
Tender and Loving
By focusing outwards and noticing the “men and women working to provide essential services” we can show our love for them with simple acknowledgement of their sacrifice, their hard work, their humanity. So often we simply do not see those around us providing the services that make everyone’s lives move a little more smoothly. I know I am guilty of refusing to make eye contact with those I don’t want to interact with, but by doing so I am rendering that person invisible. By denying our shared humanity I am snuffing out their existence in my world. I have found that a simple hello, excuse me, please, and thank you work wonders. The Golden Rule really does apply here. Imagining how difficult life can be for those around us, and then speaking tenderly to them and working at loving them even when they are tired, or we find them frightening or difficult, will lead us towards emulating St. Joseph’s tenderness and love.
Obedience
Here is a word charged with negativity. But as defined, obedience is simply complying or being willing to comply. We are all called to comply with or obey our mission as Christians to see Christ in those around us. By practicing obedience, those essential workers we see who are exhausted, frightened, and worn thin become Christ in our presence. By imagining everyone I meet as Christ, it becomes easier to treat them with the love and respect they deserve.
Accepting
This ties in nicely with being tender and loving. I know that it is very important that my family accept me as I am: moody, impatient, obsessive, afraid to admit I’m cranky, scared, or hopeless. Now imagine someone working at the end of their 8-hour shift at the big box store, earning $19,500 a year, knowing that their Food Stamps won’t be in for yet another week, and facing pancakes and Kool-Aid for dinner for the third night in a row. Acceptance of that person’s short temper, dismissiveness, or even rudeness, allows us to meet them where they are. By understanding that people’s words and actions can reflect on what they are going through outside of their interaction with you has a surprising way of bringing grace to the situation.
Creatively Courageous
Francis states that, “This emerges especially in the way we deal with difficulties. In the face of difficulty, we can either give up and walk away, or somehow engage with it. At times, difficulties bring out resources we did not even think we had.” This is reflected by being creatively courageous and ensuring that we support worker’s rights to a safe workspace, with adequate personal protective equipment, access to paid time off when sick with COVID or unable to work due to quarantine requirements, as well as working towards equitable distribution of vaccines. In Dallas, a large vaccine hub opened up in Fair Park, designated to provide a place for those living in this neglected part of town to be vaccinated. Guess who came? The privileged who live north of the Trinity River, who had the ability to access the internet and the resources to utilize the system for registration, as well as the transportation to get there. Many essential workers belong to marginalized groups, the undocumented, LGBTQ, people of color, or lower socioeconomic status. Sharing information on COVID testing sites, vaccination schedules, or volunteering with parishes or workplaces to deliver written and spoken information in other languages can be creatively courageous, especially when you have to challenge your own long held beliefs or the beliefs of your family or community. We emulate St. Joseph, Patron Saint of Workers, by fighting for living wages and work environments safe from unnecessary exposure to COVID and protection through vaccine access.
Working
It’s difficult to improve on Francis’ words: “A family without work is particularly vulnerable to difficulties, tensions, estrangement and even break-up. How can we speak of human dignity without working to ensure that everyone is able to earn a decent living?” In our concern for essential workers, this can mean supporting legislation that provides increased access to healthcare, an increase in the minimum wage, working towards a universal basic income, or supporting unionization and worker’s right. It may look like setting up voting registration sites or working against voter suppressive legislation. Improving work environments not only helps those working in that environment, it strengthens families and improves the mental, spiritual, and physical health of the larger community.
In the Shadows
To paraphrase Francis, whenever one accepts responsibility for the life of another, we become a parent to that person. The essential workers during this pandemic are as orphans, abandoned by their fellow citizens, their cities, states, and federal government, deemed “essential” so that they can risk their lives to provide for those of us who were sheltering in place. Healthcare workers are shunned because of our fear of being exposed to COVID. Workers try to feed their families and stay afloat while providing goods and services while we shout at them because we didn’t want to be inconvenienced by masks, shortened store hours, social distancing, or supply shortages. None of us have been exhibiting very much in the way of saintly behavior. We need to take responsibility for those who work to provide what we need. And like any parent, we should want what is in their best interest: safe work environments, worker protection, and respect. And that respect means forgiving them when they are tired and discouraged, helping them when they are overworked and placed in unsafe working conditions, and supporting local, state, and federal assistance.
May we use this month, in fact this entire year, to practice St. Joseph’s virtues in the way we treat the essential workers of our communities, choosing to walk as equals beside them and resist the urge to treat them as our means to an end.
Annette Paulsen has a master’s in bioethics from Loyola University of Chicago. That and $4.75 will get you a venti White Chocolate Mocha at Starbucks. She loves her husband, two sons, and two cats, though not always in that order. She works at a large academic medical center in oncology research and loves her job. She struggles through the pandemic though not in ways you would expect. The worst part consists of finding out how many people she either knows or is related to who are completely and utterly baffling in their backwards viewpoints. She struggles with accepting people where they are, not sharing her opinions with them, and letting them suffer the consequences of their actions. She is a devout Catholic who loves the bells and smells, attends a Spanish-speaking parish filled with faithful, hardworking, loving people and is struggling to learn Spanish. Every day she gets out of bed, wondering if there is anything other than this life at this moment, gets dressed, and walks out the door in hope.
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