Have vigil lights set and worked on my St. Joseph altar in a nine-day community altar work service beginning on Sunday, May 1st, the feast day of St. Joseph the Worker.
I will begin a nine-day novena and chaplet recitation to St. Joseph on this same day, focused on petitioning his intercession for the unemployed, the underemployed, those whose income is or could become unreliable or unpredictable, and those struggling to find dignity in their work. Your petition/intention will be included daily in my novena and chaplet work.
You do not have to book a spot in the vigil service in order to have your name and petition included in my 9 days of novena and chaplet prayers. You can simply submit your name and petition via the intake form and in place of the service/order #, type “joseph novena prayers only.” There is no cost for this option (though if you’d like to, you can make an optional donation in any amount you wish).
Lights will be set on Sunday, May 1st. There is some wiggle room and you can join up after the work starts as long as you see that there are still spots left and it doesn’t say “sold out.”
St. Joseph is the patron saint of fathers, foster parents, carpenters, craftsmen, travelers, immigrants, and families and workers in general. He has two feast days in the Western Catholic calendar, and this one focuses specifically on his patronage of workers.
Have vigil lights set and worked on my St. Joseph altar in a nine-day community altar work service beginning on Saturday, May 1st, the feast day of St. Joseph the Worker. There is some wiggle room and you can join up after the work starts as long as you see that there are still spots left and it doesn’t say “sold out.”
I will begin a nine-day novena and chaplet recitation to St. Joseph on this same day, focused on petitioning his intercession for the unemployed, the underemployed, those whose income is unreliable or unpredictable, and those struggling to find dignity in their work. Your petition/intention will be included daily in my novena and chaplet work.
You do not have to book a spot in the vigil service in order to have your name and petition included in my 9 days of novena and chaplet prayers. You can simply submit your name and petition via the intake form and in place of the service/order #, type “joseph novena prayers only.” There is no cost for this option (though if you’d like to, you can make an optional donation in any amount you wish).
St. Joseph is the patron saint of fathers, foster parents, carpenters, craftsmen, travelers, immigrants, and families and workers in general. He has two feast days in the Western Catholic calendar, and this one focuses specifically on his patronage of workers.
Please note that community altar work services do not come with individual readings/reports, though I will post at least one photo of the work to the Discord “forum” for clients, which you’ll receive an invitation to after you book your vigil service spot.
Options
Vigil light setting service – Have a fixed, dressed, blessed vigil light candle set with your petition/intention along with other community members’ candles to burn for the entirety of the nine-day novena (and since commercial vigil candles these days generally burn for about five days, this service will involve two candles per petition/intention so lights are burning continuously for nine days). I need the date of birth and full name of the person who the light is being set for along with a one- or two-sentence petition or intention.
Prayers only – If you can’t book a vigil light service but want your petition/intention included in my novena and chaplet prayers, you can simply submit your name, DOB, and petition using the intake form but typing “joseph novena prayers only” in the box for the service/order #. There is zero cost for this option. You will not do anything from the listing page except click the link to the intake form, since you aren’t checking out to book a service.
Donation – If you’d like to make a donation to help offset the cost of pro bono and reduced rate services that I provide for folks experiencing income instability and career challenges during this COVID mess, you can do so here. (Offsite PayPal link)
Steps
After you check out, fill out the intake form giving your order #, petition, the names of any people involved, and any photos you want me to use in setting your lights.
Once I’ve got everything set up, you’ll receive an invitation to my client Discord server via email if you’ve booked a vigil light setting.
St. Joseph’s intercession is sought to help with all kinds of matters relating to home, family, and jobs/business. He can be called upon to help you sell your house, help you remodel, and to help carpenters and others who work with their hands. He’s particularly known for going to bat for fathers, though he absolutely is an ally for mothers as well (and speaking as someone who was a single mother with sole custody for 18 years who never received a cent of child support, if you’re wearing all the parenting hats at once, St. Joseph is definitely your friend – he will help any parent, foster parent, or caregiver who is struggling to provide for children).
He’s also the patron saint of travelers, immigrants, workers, and families, and he’s called on to ensure a happy death.
Have a vigil light set on my St. Joseph altar with your private petition/intention during the upcoming community altar work service on the 19th. You can also opt to have a customized St. Joseph paket made during the service to be shipped after its conclusion. Learn more or join up at the Seraphin Station shop.
Woodcut by Jacobus de Man, haven’t tracked down the specific publication yet, but it’s late 1600s, early 1700s and public domain. [1]
“Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” – John 11:5
The Gospel of Luke tells us how Martha invited Jesus to her home in Bethany. She cooked and cleaned and catered while her sister Mary sat at Christ’s feet and listened to him speak. Martha pointed out that Mary wasn’t pitching in.
“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things,but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41, NIV)
Christ’s point is that in the grand scheme of things, your eternal soul is more important than social conventions and what people think about your housekeeping. But we need to understand this in context. It’s not that Martha had no imagination or faith or respect or that she was too small-minded to want to sit at Christ’s feet, too.
In Martha’s mind and in her culture, these were her duties, and her performance of them comprised her reputation, value, and trustworthiness as a member of her culture — in a society that valued hospitality quite highly, that in fact didn’t even work as a society without hospitality as a huge part of the glue that held it together.
She wasn’t saying nobody should value hearing him teach. She also wanted to hear him speak; she was also his disciple and believed in him. She was just pointing out that people needed to eat and wash and sit, and somebody’s efforts had to make that happen. (You can imagine that Jesus was accompanied by an entourage, too, all of whom also needed to eat and wash and sit.) She was determined to do her duties well for such an esteemed guest as Jesus, but she wasn’t a doormat. She was pointing out that she was not the only one who could be doing these things, that she *could* be sitting at Christ’s feet right now, too, if she just gave off doing the less glamorous stuff. But somebody has to do it. Dramatic events are unfolding, but somebody has to make the setting they’re unfolding in happen.
In John 12, Christ is in Bethany again before Passover at a dinner in his honor. Lazarus is reclined at the table with him. Word of his resurrection has spread like wildfire; Jesus’ followers are increasing and so are the machinations against his life. Mary makes a spectacle of herself pouring half of liter of precious perfume on Christ’s feet – worth a year’s wages – and wiping them with her hair. Christ is constantly, increasingly aware of the massive cosmic drama he’s part of and what’s right around the corner, his every action and word heavily symbolic. Every step he takes is under the weight of prophecy and its fulfillment, is part of a massive dramatic ritual. In this play, Christ has simultaneously the perspective of the main character and the omniscience of the author. The drama in John’s portrayal is thick indeed.
Martha during all of this? John writes only, “Martha served” (John 12:2).
Hindu deities on vodun altars: Rush, Dana. “Eternal Potential: Chromolithographs in Vodunland,”African Arts vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 60-75+94-96. Also helpful more broadly, imo, for any student of folklore/popular religion who’s ever encountered an argument about whether Abre Camino is “real hoodoo” or not, wondered what to think about the development of the seven-colors school of approach to Santisima Muerte, or pondered the relationships between figures like Legba vs. Ellegua.
Giffords, Gloria Fraser. The Iconography of Mexican Folk Retablos. Thesis. University of Arizona, 1969. I tend to assume everybody immediately sees why stuff like this is so interesting. I tend to be wrong. But basically the iconography had never been studied before this, so this was a big deal, this work. And if you like to understand what you’re looking at when you see a candle in a botanica or grocery store, you’ll encounter plenty of stuff that had its origins here whether you personally work with that imagery/tradition or not.
I read Telling Memories Among Southern Women: DomesticWorkers and Their Employers in the Segregated South years ago, and even then, before I’d really started *studying* this stuff in any consistent and applied way, I felt like everybody I knew ought to read it. I knew they wouldn’t – people think this stuff doesn’t have anything to do with them if their families weren’t the ones being described in these stories – but they’d be wrong, ’cause this is part of how we got here. And the impact of it doesn’t just disappear suddenly when it’s no longer fashionable or feasible or *whatever* to have domestic employees. This is part of Southern culture, y’all, and it’s part of how your role in it, as whatever sex, race, class, gender, family role stratum you occupy, got constructed and defined.
I still feel the same way in 2020. I think Southern folks should read this book — especially white folks. Especially white women. Here’s a review with a useful summary at the Washington Post.
Seraphin Station 