Eventide & Altar

Joachim and Anne are remembered today - Mary's parents, Jesus's grandparents, the two people whose names tradition preserved even though Scripture did not. They raised the woman who would say yes at the Annunciation. Nothing is recorded of how they raised her. We only know what she became.

The sign-action of the linen cloth is one of the stranger object lessons in Jeremiah - a new garment, worn close to the body, buried without washing, retrieved after a long interval rotted and ruined. The cloth did nothing wrong. It was separated from the body it was made to cling to, and the separation is what ruined it. The theological point is in the clinginess. Israel was meant for intimacy with God, not distance.

You have had both. The seasons of closeness and the seasons of distance. The years when prayer was alive and the years when it was habit more than encounter. And also - perhaps this is worth naming at this point in the faith - the seasons of return. The finding that the separation had not made return impossible, that the God who scattered still gathers, that the cloth even if damaged can be drawn close again.

The mustard seed and the yeast are the other side. Both start hidden. Both work invisibly, from the inside. Both produce something large from something small. The faith that was planted in you, likely by people like Joachim and Anne, may have gone through seasons of burial. It is still growing. The birds are dwelling in branches you cannot yet see the full extent of.

Today is a good day to name the Joachims and Annes in your own life - the ones who planted without seeing the harvest, who prayed across decades, whose faith became the ground yours grew from. They deserve to be named.

The Joyful Mysteries - beginning with the seed planted in Mary, who was planted in Joachim and Anne. The kingdom hidden from the foundation of the world, announced in parables, growing in households like the one that raised the Mother of God.

• In gratitude for Joachim and Anne - for all who planted faith without seeing its full growth - we pray to the Lord.
• For those in the separated-cloth season of their faith, not yet ruined but drifting, that the call to return would reach them before the distance does its work, we pray to the Lord.
• For whatever is still growing invisibly in us and in those we have prayed for across many years, that we would trust what we cannot yet see, we pray to the Lord.

Name the Joachim or Anne in your life - the specific person whose faith became the ground your faith grew from. Not as an abstraction but as a person, with a face and a name. Hold them before God today in gratitude. If they are still living, tell them. If not, the telling is a prayer.