The other day I described the Protestant mentality as a kind of separation of Church and State within the individual. That, of course, itself depends on the idea that there is something like Church and State in the individual, which I seems to me almost self-evident. There is in man that which seeks the ultimate and that which deals with the immediate. You can’t live without the latter, and you can’t direct it without the former. This is part of the bi-fold nature of earthly reality; there is always both Matter and Form, soul and body, the immediate and the eternal. Thus, in the human experience, body and soul, practicality and piety, State and Church.

In all cases, if you try to split them, you end up with a wholly or primarily material / immediate focus, since while you can’t actually divide them, you can ignore the eternal side and act on blind assumption in that regard without it immediately registering, while if you try to do that bodily, you’ll get a sharp discouragement pretty quickly (so, the immediate problems make themselves known much faster than the eternal ones, if you can believe that).

Which is all a convoluted way of saying that they two aspects are meant to operate in harmony; ‘the Church’ guiding and sanctifying ‘the State’, while ‘the State’ protects and provides for ‘the Church’.

Getting more specific, these two are both aspects of not only the individual, but of the Church. Because of a habit of language, we tend to use the term ‘Church’ to refer to specifically the clergy and religious orders, forgetting that it also, and more completely, refers to the whole body of the Faithful; the clergy and the laity. Spiritual and Temporal orders.

Me, I like to think of the Holy Family as embodying this double aspect: with Mary being the Spiritual order and Joseph being the Temporal. Between the two, they bring Christ to the world.

Again, I think one of the big problems we have today is that we neglect the temporal aspect of the Faith and try to segregate it off from worship. Of course, to be fair, we often do the same thing with work and career. Neither our religious observances nor our labor are part of a unified whole, but separate entities each with their own sphere, wherein we pay our dues then move on.

The example of St. Joseph should remind us that these things are meant to be united as a single organism, labor serving piety and finding its purpose therein.

Hard as it is in our world, we ought to strive to make our lives unified in this way, to create, not an amalgam of different interests and pursuits, but a complete, harmonized whole directed to Christ.

St. Joseph, pray that we may find the way to do so.