Prayer

To you, O Blessed Joseph, do we come in our need, confident that you will hear our prayer. Through the tender and chaste love that bound you to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God, and through the paternal love with which you embraced the Child Jesus, we humbly beg you to look upon us with the same affection and through your power and strength aid us in our necessities. (mention petitions)

O glorious St. Joseph, spouse of Mary our Mother, obtain for each of us a pure, humble, and charitable mind, and perfect resignation to the Divine Will. Be our guide, our father, and our model through life, that we may merit to die as you did in the arms of Jesus and Mary. Amen.

O glorious St. Joseph, through the love you bear to Jesus Christ and for the glory of His Name, hear our prayers and obtain our petition.

Reflections excerpted from Guardian of the Redeemer, by St. John Paul II.

The total sacrifice, whereby Joseph surrendered his whole existence to the demands of the Messiah's coming into his home, becomes understandable only in the light of his profound interior life.  It was from his interior life that "very singular commands and consolations came, bringing him also the strength that belongs to simple souls, and giving him the power of making great decisions - such as the decision to put his freedom immediately at the disposition of God’s plan, to hand over to God’s designs also his legitimate human calling, his conjugal happiness, to accept the conditions, the responsibility and the burden of a family, but, through an incomparable virginal love, to renounce that natural conjugal love that is the foundation and nourishment of the family. 
There was a profound communion of life between Joseph and Jesus.  Daily closeness to Jesus opened St. Joseph to the sanctifying power of the Sacred humanity of Jesus. 
If through Christ's humanity, God’s love shone on all mankind, then the first beneficiaries were undoubtedly those whom the divine will had most intimately associated with His humanity itself: Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and Joseph, his presumed father. 

Why should the "fatherly" love of Joseph not have had an influence upon the "filial" love of Jesus? And vice versa, why should the "filial" love of Jesus not have had an influence upon the "fatherly" love of Joseph, thus leading to a further deepening of their unique relationship?  Those souls most sensitive to the impulses of divine love have rightly seen in Joseph a brilliant example of the interior life. 

Furthermore, in Joseph, the apparent tension between the active and the contemplative life finds an ideal harmony that is only possible for those who possess the perfection of charity.   Joseph experienced both love of the truth - that pure contemplative love of the divine Truth which radiated from the humanity of Christ - and the demands of love - that equally pure and selfless love required for his vocation to safeguard and develop the humanity of Jesus, which was inseparably linked to his divinity.

May we look to the example of St. Joseph, the Patron of the Interior Life, as we strive to fulfill our contemplative Passionist vocation.