CW* Friday, 26 July - Anne and Joachim, Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

Today feast of St Anne, the mother of Our Lady, or the feast of both St Anne & her husband, St Joachim, depending on your saintly calendar.

Pictorial Lives of the Saints July 26.—St. Anne

ST. ANNE was the spouse of St. Joachim, and was chosen by God to be the mother of Mary, His own Blessed Mother on earth. They were both of the royal house of David, and their lives were wholly occupied in prayer and good works. One thing only was wanting to their union—they were childless, and this was held as a bitter misfortune among the Jews. At length, when Anne was an aged woman, Mary was born, the fruit rather of grace than of nature, and the child more of God than of man. With the birth of Mary the aged Anne began a new life: she watched her every movement with reverent tenderness, and felt herself hourly sanctified by the presence of her immaculate child. But she had vowed her daughter to God, to God Mary had consecrated herself again, and to Him Anne gave her back. Mary was three years old when Anne and Joachim led her up the Temple steps, saw her pass by herself into the inner sanctuary, and then saw her no more. Thus was Anne left childless in her lone old age, and deprived of her purest earthly joy just when she needed it most. She humbly adored the Divine Will, and began again to watch and pray, till God called her to unending rest with the Father and the Spouse of Mary in the home of Mary’s Child.

Saints of grandparents, couples with no children, women in labour, and women unable to conceive.

Anne & Joachim, 20 years of marriage with no children.

Why are we celebrating the feast of St Anne & St Joachim? This reminds me of a question my mother-in-law asked me. “If Mary had to be immaculate to give birth to a Jesus who was free from the stain of original sin, does this not create an infinite regress?” If Mary had to be immaculate, would not her mother, St Anne, also need to be immaculate, and St Anne’s mother also, and so on ad infinitum.

I’m sure there are different ways of thinking about this question but my response goes roughly like this:

As it is for the rest of us, Mary is only healed, sanctified, saved, made holy, made immaculate, through Jesus. This is also the case for anyone who lived before Jesus (in our finite perspective of history which appears linear to us). Mary is immaculate, not so that she could prevent the stain of original sin passing hereditarily onto Jesus, but Mary is immaculate because she is, in the words of the early church theologians, the “New Eve.” She is the first one to be born from the side of Jesus, as Eve, in that creation story, was taken from Adam.

Just because someone like St Augustine said some really good and helpful stuff, doesn’t mean he’s right on everything. This of course is the same for all of us. We all have our cultural blind spots. It feels a bit unfair to single out Augustine, rather than point to the cultual mileau he was thinking through, but he is very respresentative of certain strands of theology.

For someone like Augustine, for whom, the stain of original sin was passed on through the sexual act and through birth, it feels like it makes sense to explain the church’s speaking of Mary as immaculate as because she needed to not pass on original sin through birth. But just because we recognise the problems with this, such as the problem of the infinite regress, this doesn’t mean that the church’s speaking of Mary as immaculate was wrong. It was just the wrong explanation.

It’s possible to think about Mary being immaculate from her birth, or from the moment of conceiving Jesus, and loving him with immaculate love, or from the moment of his death where the sword pierces her heart, but either way, the important thing for me is that the cause of her being immaculate is Jesus, rather than her immaculate nature being the cause of Jesus’s sinlessness.

This is all quite abstract and it begs the question, “What does this mean for us?”

One thing I want to point out is that the early church found itself proclaiming certain things in its worship. Namely, Jesus was God and that Mary was in some sense really important. And that is often how the Spirit seems to work. We find ourselves wanting to say some very broad and general things of God. But when we try to explain why it is we are wanting to say those things, or how best to say them, we encounter problems.

That is not to say that I think theology or thinking hard is a bad thing. I would be very sad if that was the case. But we must remember, whenever we try to explain things we are likely, if not certainly, going to make colossal blunders. An example might be, an Evangelical coming to an anglo-catholic church for the first time might wonder why everyone isn’t having very energetic and lively conversations with each other before the service. They might explain this as us anglo-catholics being a bunch of grumpy gooseberries - and that might be true for me and Fr Neil, but what an Evangelical might not instintively grasp is that many anglo-catholics see the time before Mass as a time of preparation to meet with God. The worship doen’t begin at the processional hymn, but is an eternal reality.

Likewise, an anglo-catholic might go to an Evangelical church and think that church was being treated as a social club. And again, just as that might be true for some people some of the time, an Evangelical might more instinctively sense the way in the Word of God can be proclaimed to each other through fellowship. I’m sure that’s an unfair generalisation and I’ve probably just offended everyone here but I hope you get something of the point. The Spirit might be telling us that something is important but when we try to explain it, we need to seek the help of others.

O St. Anne, our spiritual grandmother. Please pray for us!

We come to you today knowing that you know what it’s like to wait on God to answer your heart’s greatest desires.

We come to you today asking that you will ask God to grant our petition the way that He granted yours.

We ask that you pray, St. Anne, to ask Our Lord to have mercy and favor on us.

Please pray that we may be open to God’s will the way that you were, and that we will be able to wait with patience, perseverance in faith and hope, and with absolute trust in the Lord’s plan for us.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.