We Are Called to God — Mary Shows Us How to Respond

Today marks the memorial of The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Giving background and context for our lives, Fr. Peter John Cameron writes in his beautiful Mysteries of the Virgin Mary: Living Our Lady’s Graces:

The inspiration for the Feast of the Presentation of Mary (celebrated November 21) comes from certain apocryphal texts (notable ancient writings not included in the official canon of the Bible). According to these accounts, on a given day Joachim and Anne solemnly brought their three-year-old daughter to the temple in order to fulfill a vow and to obtain education for their blessed child.

The gesture is a sublime act of self-donation—a ritualized gift of her person, her “I”—that serves to define the very life and vocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In one of her revelations, St. Bridget voices Our Lady’s thoughts at her presentation: “As the time approached when, by rule, virgins were presented in the temple of the Lord, I went up among them in submission to my parents, thinking that nothing was impossible to God. And as he knew that I desired nothing, wished nothing but himself, he could, if it pleased him, preserve me in my virginity. Through this sacred event Our Lady models the kind of disposition every Christian is called to have toward God, even from the earliest moment of our life.

In offering Mary to the Lord in the temple, Joachim and Anne are, in effect, presenting the Blessed Virgin to her destiny.