On September 8th, the Church opens the liturgical year — which begins on September 1st — with a birth. It is no accident that the ecclesial year, the one that will later carry the purple of every other feast, every transfiguration, every crucifixion and every resurrection, opens precisely here, at the threshold of a barren household: with the Nativity of the Mother of God from the long-closed womb of Anna and Joachim. Everything that will come afterward — the Baptism, the Transfiguration, the Cross, the Resurrection — opens through a door no one still expected to open, because, humanly speaking, it had long since been shut, and what is wholly shut is not opened by any law of nature, but only by the Spirit, who blows where He wills.
The tradition preached by St. John Damascene and St. Andrew of Crete in their homilies on this feast does not conceal the length and weight of that barrenness: many years of unanswered prayer, years in which the two elders bore, before a world that read fruitfulness or curse in a woman’s body, the reproach of childlessness — the same reproach Elizabeth will later speak of herself, when she too conceives the Forerunner: „Thus hath the Lord dealt with me… to take away my reproach among men” (Luke 1:25). The law of nature had long since given its verdict: this womb would never bear fruit again. And it was exactly where the law of nature had closed its account that another law, subject to none of it and contained by none of it, could begin to work.
Beneath Anna’s barrenness lies an older and vaster barrenness: the royal root of Jesse itself. The prophet had said centuries before: „There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots” (Isaiah 11:1) — spoken at a time when the house of David reigned nowhere, reduced to a genealogy of names without a throne, a root history counted as dried up. Patristic reading sees this very feast anticipated here: the Rod is the Mother of God, the Flower is Christ. Anna’s barrenness and the barrenness of the royal line are the same barrenness, seen from two angles — bodily and historical — and both are healed by the same act, subject to no law known on earth. This is why the feast is truly royal: not for any earthly pomp, but because exactly where the royal line seemed altogether extinguished, God lays the cornerstone of a kingdom that „shall have no end” (Luke 1:33).
Hymnography and patristic reading see in the Virgin’s infancy the silent fulfillment of every figure of the Old Law, each of them likewise set against a law of nature: the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:10-16), carried by the Levites without being touched, for the unclean man died at its touch — a figure of the womb that will carry God without being consumed; Jacob’s Ladder (Genesis 28:12), which joins earth to heaven exactly where, naturally, there was nothing but a stone for a pillow; the Bush at Horeb, which burned and was not consumed (Exodus 3:2); the closed gate seen by Ezekiel, „through which no one shall enter, but the Lord alone,” and which „shall remain shut” (Ezekiel 44:1-3). Neither the ark, nor the bush, nor the gate is explained by the nature of the matter they are made of — wood, fire, stone — but by the sanctification that carries them beyond it. So too Anna’s womb is not explained by biology, but by the grace that carries it beyond biology.
This is why Joachim’s forty-day withdrawal into the wilderness and Anna’s weeping silence beneath the laurel tree in the garden are not an effort that produces the fruit, but exactly the opposite: a surrender of every claim to produce it themselves. They do not defend themselves before the reproach, do not resist the world’s verdict with their own strength — they empty themselves, so that inward stillness no longer defends anything of its own, but waits for everything from God. This is the mystery no human striving can counterfeit: the fruit does not come from the perseverance of prayer as from a natural cause, but from the humility that no longer counts prayer as a cause at all, but only as a state of emptiness before the One alone able to fill it.
The name itself conceals the law: Anna means „grace,” „favor” — and it is the same name borne, centuries earlier, by the mother of Samuel, another barren woman whose prayer „out of the bitterness of her soul” (1 Samuel 1:10) opened another closed womb. Grace begets grace, not by chance repetition, but because it is the constant law of the economy: God’s act always enters exactly where nature’s power has long since run out, so that no flesh should boast of its own salvation (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:29).
So too we read the Psalmist’s word concerning the queen: „Upon thy right hand did stand the queen in a vesture of gold” (Psalm 44:10, LXX) — not for any splendor added from without, but because, in this very moment of a hidden birth, in a household without a name, there opens, with no herald and no census to record it, the gate of a palace not yet seen with the eyes. The coronation takes place in secret, and He who will reign from this fruit will have „no end to His kingdom.”
This is why the feast should be kept not as a beautiful legend that happens to open the churchly autumn, but as the standing law of the Spirit, which cannot be contained by the laws of nature because it does not come from them and is not subject to them: it never comes to increase a power that still has reserve; it comes always, and only, where nature has spoken its last word and fallen silent.
Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee!
Prayer of Glory for the Nativity of the Mother of God
Glory to You, O Lord our God, You who raise the humble from the dust and open the barren wombs, to show that nothing is impossible for You! Glory to You, who from the dry root of Jesse caused the chosen Shoot to spring forth, and from the body worn by years brought forth the blessed fruit, so that all creation may know that not in the strength of nature, but in Your mercy stands all our hope! Glory to You, who heard the sigh of barren Anna and her prayer born of the bitterness of her soul, just as You once heard the other Anna, the mother of Samuel, showing that Your grace never grows weary of bringing forth grace from the most desolate place! Glory to You, who closed the gate so that You alone might open it, who kindled the bush so that it would not be consumed, who placed the Ark in the midst of the people, as a sign that Your holiness is not touched by the unclean hand, but sanctifies by itself the one who receives it! Glory to You, who today set the cornerstone of the Kingdom that shall have no end, and crown in secret—without herald and without census—the Queen who shall stand at Your right hand! Glory to You, who never come to increase a strength that still has reserve, but come always and only where nature has spoken its last word and fallen silent! Receive, O Lord, also the silence of my poor heart, and make of its desolation a place where, according to Your will, the shoot of humility and the flower of repentance may spring forth. O Lord, our mind is too narrow to grasp how great this glory is, and our word too poor to utter it as it deserves. Grant us, therefore, the power to glorify You more, and the grace of tears, so that the heart, being overwhelmed, may weep for joy where the mind has fallen silent—and may this silence be more pleasing to You than all the glory we could have spoken. That I may glorify You, the One glorified in all Your saints, now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
