The memoria of the presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary was originally a feast of the dedication of a church of Our Lady in Jerusalem. The Apocryphal writings relate that St. Joachim and St. Anne brought their 3-year-old daughter Mary to the Temple in Jerusalem in fulfillment of their vow, so that she might be educated there together with other girls, consecrated to God’s service.Our Lady herself once confided to St. Bridget that it was the virtues of humility, charity and obedience which she practiced in the temple that granted her grace and with great effort on her part i.e. constant prayers, ardent longing, tears and mortifications.
St. Augustine’s sermon taken from the Office of Reading, give rise to reflection. He says, Mary was ‘by Christ created that Christ in her might be created…She did the Father’s will…and it is a greater thing for her that she was Christ’s disciple than that she was His mother.’
We pray that we may imitate Mary by becoming detached from all earthly things and present ourselves today without reserve thus being a disciple who does the will of God the Father.
The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary; that dedication of herself, reminds us of the ‘YES’ Mary made to God. Her ‘Yes’ at the Annunciation entailed many other ‘Yes-es’, sometimes in obscurity, sometimes in situations totally unexpected and reached its climax at the foot of the cross.
Prayer is saying ‘Yes’.
When we pray and keep on praying, our ‘Yes’ moves in the direction of Jesus’ ‘Yes’.
Saying ‘Yes’ means committing ourselves to all that Jesus stood for: love, truth, justice, life, human dignity.
With the ‘Yes’ we are sure to face challenges, we realize that only through our ‘Yes’ can God continue His saving work in our world; in repeating our ‘Yes’ and living it, we joyfully experience how his power triumphs in our weakness.
The Christian can make his own choice of his favourite among the four days of the year which are feast days of the Virgin Mary. These are the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary on September 8, the Presentation of the Virgin Mary on November 21, the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary on March 25, and the Dormition of the Virgin Mary on August 15. On the calendar of the Church, all four of these days are of equal importance. The world sees the Virgin Mary much as Michelangelo did when he carved out his famous Ficta in which a youthful looking Mary is holding the lifeless body of her crucified Son. Nowhere is she seen as an old woman, at least not at the age of a woman who is the mother of a thirty-three year old son.
* Among the Holy Land's most sacred shrines is the one at the base of the Garden of Gethsemane, the site of the agony of Christ. This shrine is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and her parents. After a descent down a cement stairway of about fifty steps, the tomb of Joachim is on the left and on the right of the tomb of his wife Anna. Some fifty steps below this is the empty tomb of the Virgin Mary since, like the Son of God, she ascended into heaven. Stories abound about the Virgin Mary but the truthful one that clings and shall do so forever is that in being the mother of the Son of God, she is the mother of the world. For this reason November 21 is one of Christianity's holiest feast days.
Under Mary’s inspiration, let us renew our ‘Yes’ and thus help to build the Kingdom of God.
