Smiling Madonna
Anne and Mary
The Mother of God
“Hail (Mary) full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” Luke 1:28 By Jay Mason
C
hristmas is here again. As we prepare in Advent for the coming of Christ, I was reflecting on what it must have been like to be the Mother of God. Last fall, Kitty and I traced the footsteps of St. Paul in Greece and Turkey and then
22
December 2018
went back to the Holy Land. Along the way we learned some interesting facts about Mary. Mary was the daughter of Joachim and Anne. The parents are not mentioned in Scripture, but the Christian tradition indicates that Joachim and Anne were respected members of the Jewish community in Jerusalem. Today you can visit a church, St. Anne, just outside the Lion’s Gate of Jerusalem in a place called Bethsaida. It is the place with a well where Jesus performed a miracle. The church itself is built on the place where Mary was born. You can see the cave of her birth if you go into the crypt under the church. The most striking thing about the church for me was the statute of St. Anne and Mary. There are very few depictions of this most famous mother and daughter.
