Anne was pleased that Mary's husband would also be ...

1 Anne was pleased that Mary's husband would also be descended from King David. And now i wish I could tell you more about Anne and Joakim. There were plenty of people who wrote down what they thought was important in the history of the time. But they only wrote about men like Caesar Augustus and Herod the Great, and battles and things of that kind. Later on Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote the history of what God thought most important in the lives of Mary and her Son. But no one wrote the history of Anne and Joakim until long afterwards. By then they had forgotten what really happened and could not be really sure if what they wrote was true, or just a story. God did not mind, and we should not, for we know the really important things about them.

2 They were the father and mother of Mary. Nothing else they did matters half so much. Perhaps they worried when they heard of Mary traveling far across the hill country to visit their niece, her cousin Elizabeth. Perhaps they worried again, later, when they knew she had gone on the eighty-mile journey with Joseph to be enrolled in Bethlehem. Maybe they learned with joy of her Son's birth in the stable-cave, with angels and shepherds to greet Him. Perhaps they heard of the visit of the Wise Men with their wonderful gifts. They may have lived to see Our Little Lord. Anne may have dandled Him on her knees and watched His tiny fingers playing with Joakim's beard. Perhaps when He was a sturdy boy playing in the fields around Nazareth Anne talked to Him and petted Him.

3 Grandmothers always love and spoil their grandsons, and He must have known that she would do anything in the world for Him. Perhaps she guessed that He was a grandson like no other grandson that had ever been or would be. We cannot know for sure. But one thing we know without any doubt whatsoever. Whenever it was that Saint Anne reached heaven, then she knew that she had really and truly been like a fruitful vine and had helped to give the world the Precious Wine it thirsted for. She was the grandmother of Our Saviour, and it is that that matters to you and me. Eight hundred years later, in the Cathedral of Apt in France, the great Emperor Charlemagne watched a deaf and dumb boy showing the priests where to dig in front of the altar.

4 Long ago relics of Saint Anne had been hidden there to save them