“It is not exaggerated to say that Jesus will learn – on a human level – precisely from ‘father’ Joseph this intense interior life … which one day he will teach to his disciples.”  Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

Every year, as my youngest son’s March 19 birthday comes and goes, I am reminded of an unusual encounter on the feast of St. Joseph many celebrations ago when I met Elvis in the parking lot of Dunkin’ Donuts.

I knew it was him because he pulled up next to me in an Elvis car, with wings on the back. He had Elvis hair, dark and swirled up in the front; Elvis sunglasses, large and black, and an Elvis belt, covered with silver. He even had an Elvis swagger and a crooked Elvis smile.

Being raised in the commercial generation, my first inclination was to ask, “Is it live or is it Memorex?”

As I rolled down my window to hear his conversation with another patron, the image was shattered by his voice, which had a strange Mickey Mouse quality to it. I couldn’t help but smile at the thought of “hunka hunka burning love” being sung in high speed falsetto.

Of course, he wasn’t Elvis. We all know he’s dead and buried. But the art of imitation has reached its height with him. There are many people who work hard at defining themselves by an identity that’s not genuine. It may not be so dramatic as attempting to imitate a rock and roll legend, but when you get to know them at a deeper level you discover that what you thought was real is actually contrived.

In his book, “Crafting the Soul,”Rabbi Byron Sherwin, writes, “… rather than living one’s life as an imitation of the life of another, one should look to find the authentic self within. An individual who denies his or her own individuality articulates life with a voice other than that which is uniquely his or her own.  A person who suppresses his or her own self is in danger of missing the point of his or her own existence, of surrendering what being human means.”

It is easy to manipulate what others see on the surface, to craft that which we wish people to think about us, but to do so is to deny the person God created us to be. But our humanity and our authentic self reside at the level of soul, formed in the deep recesses of our interior lives where we can experience and respond to the mystery of God.

A novice master once responded, when asked about a life lived in Christian authenticity, that “to be a Christian was not to know the answers but to begin to live in the part of the self where the question is born … He was speaking of an attitude of listening, of awareness of presence, of an openness to mystery.”

St. Joseph was such a person. It seems knowledge of Jesus’ foster father comes more from what isn’t said about him in Scripture than what is.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI once spoke of St. Joseph as a model of recollection, whose silence in the Gospel, “does not demonstrate an empty interior, but rather the fullness of faith that he carries in his heart,” a silence that is “permeated with the contemplation of the mystery of God, in an attitude of total availability to the divine will.”

Such silence is the key to authenticity. Without it we are not able to cultivate a spirit of interior recollection. Most importantly, without it, we are unable to listen to God – the source of all that is real.

Mary Morrell serves as managing editor of The Monitor.