Burying Saint Joseph

Our house is for sale. During one week in October we touched up the paint on a few walls, bought some plants for the front porch and uncluttered. Well, somewhat. You see, the upstairs “landing” is a working art studio, with paints and canvasses and quite a few works in progress. And yes, it tends to be messy. My husband and I share the tiny office downstairs, where we both do lots of writing. And lots of not filing things. And then there’s another upstairs bedroom into which I dumped boxes of stuff when I cleaned out my mother’s house and moved her into an assisted living apartment in 2006. I set up a card table for managing her finances and not filing her paperwork. Real Life is messy.

We have a contingency offer on another house—where we hope to live Real but Less Messy lives—so we handed our keys over to a Realtor and left the country (literally) for two weeks.

When we got home, I asked our Realtor for feedback from another agent who showed our house. Here’s what she said:

Hard to see past all the “icons.”  (How do you tell people that the stuff that is their business is distracting?)

Yes, I’ve read the articles about staging.  I know the philosophy behind getting rid of all your personal stuff so that potential buyers can see themselves living in your house. I get all that. And yes, I’ve found myself distracted, looking at other people’s homes and wanting to know more about the people in the family photographs on the walls than about the walls themselves. But I also enjoy absorbing a bit of each home’s ethos… the human essence that makes it feel like Real People live within its walls.

I also know, from experience, that it often takes twelve to eighteen months to sell a house, and personally, I’m not willing to put my life on hold and live in a museum for that duration. Which brings me to Saint Joseph. The tradition of burying a statue of Saint Joseph to help sell a home isn’t anything new. I’d heard about it over the years, but it wasn’t until I began to research staging that I discovered the booming cottage industry it has become. There’s a book out now, St. Joseph, My Real Estate Agent: Why the Patron Saint of Home Life is the Patron Saint of Home-Selling. The author, Stephen J. Binz, includes prayer services for selling a house and claims the practice is not a superstition.

Pope Pius IX proclaimed Joseph the patron of the Universal Church on December 8, 1870. But it’s Saint Joseph’s life as a husband and father, carpenter and home-builder, that has catapulted him into the spotlight of modern-day real estate. Instructions for burying the Saint Joseph statue often go something like this:

Bury the statue upside down near the For Sale sign in your front yard. Say the following prayer:

Joseph of Nazareth,
I beseech thee to intercede on my behalf
To help me find a worthy buyer for my home.
I ask this in the holy name of Christ.
Amen.

You can even order “Saint Joseph Kits” online, with discounts for realtors who buy in bulk for their clients. The kits come with statues, prayers, the works. Some of these sites include disclaimers from the Catholic Church, whereas others let potential customers draw their own conclusions.

I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian. Although different jurisdictions of the Orthodox Church (i.e., Greek, Russian, Antiochian) have tagged some of their saints as patrons of various groups—like Saint Nicholas for children, sailors and bakers—we don’t tend to pray to them in such exclusive categories. But even if we do seek, for example, St. Phanourios’ help in finding a lost object, we don’t bury statues of him in our yards. But we might bake a special St. Phanourios cake as a thanks offering if the object is found and give the cake to someone as a gift.

We paint pictures of saints and we light candles before them and even kiss them in our personal prayers at home and our corporate prayers at church. This morning I spent several hours upstairs in my (messy) studio working on an icon of the Mother of God. It’s modeled after one of the first icons ever painted, by the Apostle Luke. While we were in Greece (and strangers were walking around in our messy house back home in Memphis),  I saw one of those ancient icons attributed to Saint Luke. I lit a candle before it in a monastery on the Island of Leros and asked the intercessions of the Mother of God for a friend who had just suffered a great loss, and others who are searching for jobs. For one who is going through a divorce and another who is pregnant. And yes, for the sale of our house and the purchase of the new one. But after all of these intercessions I would try to remember to add the following words, which I learned from a dear Greek friend: An theli o Theos. As God wills. Prayer isn’t just about asking for things.

It’s not magic. And no, I won’t be burying any icons. I also won’t be cleaning up my icon studio and hiding the evidence of the messy but beautiful lives that are lived here in this house that is for sale. My husband and I won’t stop writing at our computers and leaving stacks of unfiled paperwork around our crowded but so-very-Real workspaces.

Maybe our house would sell quicker if we buried a Saint Joseph statue or hired a professional stager. Our Realtor has worked with us on and off for almost 20 years. So, my response to her email about the Distracting Icons came as no surprise to her:

“Icons are supposed to be distracting. They’re doing their job, distracting people from their earthly lives and pointing them towards spiritual things. They are windows to Heaven.”

This place in our home where icons are made, my studio, has been sanctified by their presence. The messy little office has seen the birth of medical articles and essays, short stories and even a novel. Who has time for filing and uncluttering when such creative forces are at work?

Someone will want to live here one day. Someone who knows what a house looks like when it’s inhabited by Real People living Real Lives, which are busy and colorful and sometimes messy. 

Susan Cushman is an artist and writer who lives in Memphis.  Her essay, “myPod,” appeared in the October 2007 issue of skirt!.

~Susan Cushman