DORMITION OF THE RIGHTEOUS ANNA

Everything we know about the parents of the Virgin Mary, Joachim and Anna, is based on Holy Tradition. In the Orthodox understanding, Tradition, like Scripture, is the most important part of Divine Revelation. Revelation, in the Christian sense, is the Self-Revelation of God in Christ Jesus, revealed in the world by the Holy Spirit for the salvation of people.

According to Tradition, Joachim and Anna were childless until their old age. Three years after the birth of Mary, they, according to a vow they had made earlier, dedicated their Daughter to God, and soon departed to the Lord. Like St Simeon, Anna the Prophetess, and other righteous people of the late Old Testament from the Gospel, God judged them to see the immediate coming of salvation, but did not predestinate them to become eyewitnesses of its fulfillment on the Cross and in the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. For they died in the early years of the earthly life of the Savior.

In the final blessing of each Orthodox liturgical service, in the prayers and sacraments where the names of the saints are invoked, the Church, through the voice of the priest, asks for the intercession of the holy righteous Joachim and Anna. This common liturgical practice is not just an obligation. It is a clear testimony to the great veneration enjoyed by the holy parents of the Holy Virgin in the Ancient Church, the Middle Ages, and the relatively recent past. Thus, Saint Demetrius of Rostov (1651-1709), in 1702, when assuming the Rostov cathedra, first visited the Cathedral of the Conception of the Most Holy Theotokos, which in the Orthodox understanding is the true feast of her holy parents, and bequeathed to be buried in one of the precincts of this church.

In past centuries, people, as a rule, did not have access to books containing parts of the Holy Tradition, due to their rarity and high cost at that time. They had the right to sincerely ask themselves what we know about the parents of the Blessed Virgin. For us, Orthodox Christians, living in the era of “information abundance”, sacred and secular, the main thing is to remember and sincerely honor these saints, as our ancestors honored them in Holy Rus’ and throughout the Universal Church. So, in these last times, the question sounds as a reminder and a reproach, to what extent the memory of Saints Joachim and Anna is truly celebrated in the personal piety of the faithful.