If July 26 had not fallen on a Sunday this year, we would have been celebrating Saints Joachim and Anne, the Blessed Virgin Mary’s parents, and our Lord’s grandparents. Today is a wonderful day to pray for our grandparents, whether they are still living or have gone to their eternal reward.
I know that there are many complicated family situations, but for those of us who are blessed to still have our grandparents, today would be a great day to call them. I have one living grandparent, my grandmother on my mom’s side. I don’t do as good of a job visiting and talking to her as I would like, but it’s always nice to see her, even if it is because I’m trying to help her fix an issue with her phone or something like that.
I keep her and my deceased grandparents in my prayers and in my thoughts regularly. My grandparents on dad’s side lived in the suburbs of Chicago. I always enjoyed visiting them, hearing stories about Grandpa Siegman’s time working for Standard Oil Company or from Grandma Siegman about growing up in Texas and about her relatives in Louisiana. (Dad would tell me about driving past the Tabasco plant and smelling it all the way from the highway!) On mom’s side, my grandparents lived in Norton, KS for many years. Grandpa Herman had a lot of hard-won wisdom from his years working in steel construction, and some of my favorite memories of him are working on my Ark of the Covenant project in middle school and then sanding and painting a wooden steam engine I got as a birthday gift one year. (He wouldn’t let me quit working on it until it was done properly!)
My parents are now grandparents, and I hope that my nieces and nephews find them as inspiring, interesting, and loving as I found my grandparents.
This feast day is an interesting one, because the names of Saints Joachim and Anne come from a work called the Protoevangelium of James, which is not a part of scripture but the Church did take some lessons from it. (The dates for Mary’s Nativity and Presentation, September 8 and November 21, come from this work too.) This is a good reminder that Scripture is not the only way the traditions within our Church are preserved. The Liturgy and the memory of the Christian people also preserve our traditions. St. John Damascene, from the 8th century, mentions them in his homily on Mary’s Nativity:
Joachim and Ann, how blessed a couple! All creation is indebted to you.
For your hands the Creator was offered a gift exceeding all other gifts: a chaste mother, who alone was worthy of him.
And so rejoice, Ann, that you were sterile and have not borne children; break forth into shouts, you who have not given birth. Rejoice, Joachim, because from your daughter a child is born for us, a son is given us, whose name is Messenger of great counsel and universal salvation, mighty God. For this child is God. Joachim and Ann, how blessed and spotless a couple! You will be known by the fruit you have borne, as the Lord says: “by their fruits you will know them”. The conduct of your life pleased God and was worthy of your daughter. For by the chaste and holy life you led together, you have fashioned a jewel of virginity; she who remained a virgin before, during and after giving birth. She alone for all time would maintain her virginity in mind and soul as well as in body.
That’s all for this week.
Fr. Matt