Joseph, oh Joseph, where for art thou?

He looked at me with a mix of sly embarrassment. He turned away from me with a mix of sly embarrassment and dumbstruck speechlessness.  There was a touch of a smile but mostly silence. I had asked the young fella 'what do you mean when you wink at someone?' It was on my mind, I don't recall why.  I had probably read an article on non-verbal communication. Or maybe I had seen a show where a wink was misconstrued.  I have to confess that sometimes I seek understanding of wider society through the young people I serve with.  So as we sat waiting on cool marble steps on a hot day, and I asked about winking.

The young man I asked, he stayed in that sly silence for a while. You could see his mind trying to come up with an answer he would share with an adult female.  Eventually, a chaperon/peer spoke up and said, 'it means what you think it means.'  Which I still have some questions about, but that is for another time.

Unnamed and unknown biblical character of pageants past

You see, I see that same look on the faces of young males almost every year.  It rests there mixing with what I am sure will be the syllables of ' um, not really'.  This time though the question is 'Will you be Joseph?'  Over and over I see echoes of that same sly embarrassed look when trying to cast a late-elementary or young teen male for the role of Joseph the husband of Mary for the annual pageant.  I frequently am greeted with the same awkward silence.  There is pressure to please and to participate, but no, not Joe.

As for Mary, I get queries mid-summer if not before Easter.  I have heard accomplished women tell me how much they resented never getting to be Mary.  (Someday I am going to have an all Mary pageant just to alleviate some of this angst and amuse myself).   Mary is a big deal; the star may be the infant, but in any pageant the co-star is certainly this young woman.  My current costume closet has three options for Mary.  When the young girls ask about the role their eyes are full of wonder and delight.  They want the blue, they want to hold the baby (I consider it a personal failure if I cannot find a real infant). Frequently these girls are small, the infants are sometimes nearly half their size.

As much as she is adored and the role is prized and it is only pretend, it does touch on something verboten.  In this day and in my zone of ministry we tend to be committed family planners.  Studies show that young people like the ones in my upper middle class mainline Protestant congregation, would experience this situation as tragic.  Mary was young; not much older than the girls I usually cast.  It was a different time and place; however this practice was a contributor to high infant and maternal mortality.  Even with all of this scandalous and terrible baggage, Mary still gets the Disney princess treatment.  We ignore the deeply disturbing and celebrate the darling instead.

Joseph is actually a little bit like the prince's: in that he is relegated to a thinly developed, but crucial to the story, supporting cast member.  He is the other father of Jesus.  I have been asked 'but if God is Jesus' dad, who is Joseph?'  We know very little about him from scripture.  His brief scene in Matthew is humorous in its reality.  Plenty of people would have reacted the same way: get me out of here. He turns back, nudged by dreamy angels to stay with Mary and ultimately to keep her from becoming a woman of ill repute (at the least...in their time and place an out of wedlock pregnancy could have been a death sentence).

The rest of our selections involving Joseph are shallow.  Was he older?  Had he been married before?  His departure from the story isn't mentioned..he is in Jerusalem with the family when Jesus gets separated and astonishes the elders.  And then silence.   The undeveloped character of the role is not the issue with casting him.  It is easy to get young fellas to play supporting roles like shepherds and Magi, or Herod, or even angels (with biblically accurate swords or fire), giraffes or penguins (I have interesting pageants).

Myself and an enthusiastic
maternal character

Some of it is that there is the BABY.  Most young girls express interest in babies, they talk commonly about imagined future roles as parents and partners.   I don't hear that much from boys.  Perhaps some of it is nature, but it is certainly reinforced by socialization.  In both of the Holy Family roles there are implications of romance, of parenting and partnering.  For as much as we are over-sexualizing young people at younger and younger ages there still seems to be the stage where the other is 'icky'.

Which reminds me of what one repeat performer of the role said.  I will call him Tigger, and he says that "one of the vast reasons that a boy might NOT want to be Joseph because, well, they do not want to be the symbol of a caring male. They do not want to have to pretend to be in love with Mary and be a great man. They are to cool for that."  He goes on to suggest that these motivations are lame and not very faithful.  Yet he hits the nail on the head.  Despite the over-sexualization of children, tweens and teens, connecting yourself to these topics from our faith story in a public way can be chilling.

I posed the question to my peers and most of their experiences echoed the heart of Tigger's response.  This is an adult story, and it is fairly scandalous.  Asking young people to connect themselves with this story, at a stage when metaphor can be difficult, is inviting friction.  My neighborhood sociologist Dr. Michelle Janning expands the conundrum saying "Combine a less highlighted and less visible role with boys' likelihood to distance themselves from devalued roles like, well, acting roles, and you have a recipe for unpopular and un-masculine. Not a winning combo for boys to want to engage in." Furthermore, she points to the research that clearly shows that we reward girls for participation in nurturing roles in a way that we do not reward boys.

So what am I, what are we, to do?  I want the young boys we are forming in our communities to be nurturers. The sly young man at the start of this post was wonderful with young children, and the boy I quoted above, was one of the few Joseph's that I didn't have to instruct to pay attention to the baby. We can assume that the majority of these young men will be fathers.  I will openly state that I expect them to be involved nurturers in their families.   Furthermore, I want boys and girls and men and women, and those who find that whole dichotomy fraught with complications, I want everyone to find themselves in this story.  

For all its adult themes, it is our story and it is our life-giving scriptural story.  We 'Anglican' types are heartily focused on the incarnation, that what saves us is his entire story..from before the beginning began through his birth in human flesh to his death on the cross and his resurrection and ascension.  The whole being and life of Christ our Lord is rescue and redemption and part of the reason we act these stories out it because we claim to have found our truth and redemption in them.  

 I also don't want to make someone uncomfortable in an unnecessary/unprophetic way.   This year I found myself wondering if I really 'needed' a Joseph . Would it be like a Thursday Next novel without him??  Thank goodness that the father of the infant actress who played Jesus is a willing performer and stepped up to the task.  (I usually try to have the infant's parent close by..so this was perfect.)  Perhaps a contemporary nurturing father is just the example we need to raise up.  

Clearly the issue is complex, and deep, and much like the original story it should astound us.  Our work together can only begin to unravel how we enter this story and invite young people into this story and make it their own. We are shepherds of a story and a people, and more like the angels we are called to shake things up without shutting things down.  Maybe instead of an all Mary pageant, I need an all Joseph one.