Happy St. Joseph's Day

 Here are some special images of St. Joseph for today.  They are from the Cuzco school of religious painting.  I especially like them because I think they reveal St. Joseph as the nobleman of the House of David he is, divinely chosen to be the foster father of Jesus and the chaste spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Flowers for the Solemnity of St. Joseph

Tomorrow, the universal church celebrates the Solemnity of St. Joseph, one of the few Lenten days during which altar flowers are permitted.  The liturgical color for vestments and altar frontals is white.  That is the color for feasts of saints who are not martyrs as well as feasts of Our Lord and Our Lady.  (As far as I know, this applies whether the feast is a solemnity or not.)

There is no one specific color universally associated with St. Joseph in devotional tradition.

Apparently in Italian culture red prevails as the color to honor St. Joseph because of preventing famine in Sicily during the middle ages, despite the association of red with martyrdom.

Catholic iconography often employs brown or green with Joseph because of his earthly profession as a carpenter.  If you want to do that, you might find some ideas here and here.

Most frequently in European art, the white lily is featured in connection with Joseph  And then there is the association of Joseph with the tuberose -- the Vara of San Jose. White tuberose surely would make a lovely arrangement, emphasizing Joseph's purity and spirituality.  Unfortunately, tuberose purchased commercially can be very expensive, as can easily be seen with a quick web search.   

A possible substitute for tuberose might be white alstromeria, the blossoms of which have brown specks and the leaves of which are a nice green if the stems are fresh, thus bringing in the green and brown associated with St. Joseph.  Alstromeria is long-stemmed, long-lasting, and nowhere near as expensive as tuberose.

I personally favor the idea of two simple vases of alstromeria for tomorrow's feast day rather than an elaborate arrangement.  Somehow it seems to fit!

St Joseph and the Two-Flower Mystery

 

This is the final post in the series about St. Joseph leading up to the Solemnity of St. Joseph, Spouse of the Virgin Mary on March 19.

Today's entry is about certain flowers other than the usual white lilies used in St. Joseph iconography.

That is, in some Hispanic cultures, a flower called "nardo" is associated with St. Joseph, but which flower is it?  Is it spikenard (above)? Or is it tuberose (below)?

 A Benedictine nun, Mother Hildegard, presents the mystery in a charming blog post.  She points out that in Spanish the tuberose is called nardo or Vara de San Jose (Staff of St. Joseph). But nardo is often depicted in Hispanic iconography as spikenard.

Both plants are highly fragrant (although their scents are different), so the solution might be that the word "nardo" over time became associated with blooms that are fragrant such that both tuberose and spikenard came to be known as "nardo" even though the obvious linguistic association is with spikenard.

Tuberose is native to Mexico but spikenard is not.  Most Mexicans in colonial times had likely never seen a spikenard plant.  But a possible explanation is that in Mexico and other Spanish colonial countries, Catholics started calling tuberose "nardo" simply because of its fragrance.  The wonderful fragrance of spikenard is mentioned several times in sacred scripture including the story of Mary Magdalene anointing the feet of Our Lord. Thus, they might have used the word simply to describe the intense scent element of tuberose without any relation to its appearance or conventional nomenclature.