Anna never left the Temple, serving God night and day with fasting and prayer (cf. Lk 2-36-37)
All we know about her is a three-verse reference in the Gospel of Saint Luke.
It is found in the story of how the parents of Jesus, forty days after his birth, brought him according to the religious Jewish law to the temple in Jerusalem to purify themselves (because the birth of a child resulted in Mary's ritual uncleanness) and to offer the child to God; meaning: to give back to God, recognizing that he comes from Him. The young parents are first "stuck" to the old Simeon, who says loudly that he has been waiting for the Messiah all his life and has finally seen him, so now he can safely wait for his “removal” from this world. Then our Anna appears on the stage, about whom Luke says that she was very old, she was a widow, did not leave the temple, and when Jesus' parents were offering their sacrifices, she came and "she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem"
The whole thing, however, is that when you listen to what both old people say, you can see that Anna completes Simeon's mini lecture. He says: The Messiah has come, light to the Gentiles, the whole world is saved. Anna adds an important background to this: she mentions the city in which they both live, which at the same time is a symbol of the entire nation. She saw in the small child someone who comes with shocking news. People, somethingnew is coming! Revolution! 180-degree change! Jerusalem will cease to be a prison; it will begin to be - according to what even the prophet Isaiah foretold - a paradise of people saved by God's love and care.
Israel waited for this promise to be fulfilled, after all, Isaiah, who foretold the Messiah, lived seven hundred years before Christ. Every human being waited for him. Luke writes that Anna was eighty-four years old, and she was married for seven, after which her spouse died, so - assuming she married at the age of fourteen, as was the custom then - she was widowed for sixty-three years, exactly three-quarters of her life. Widows generally had poor life prospects in the local culture, belonging to the lowest social caste along with foreigners and orphans (because they were no longer able to increase the size of the people of Israel, and fertility and wealth were a sign that God is watching and blessing). That is why we find so many appeals in Scripture to give widows special protection. Hence, Anna's life was not easy, but she decided not to enter into another relationship, but lived by the temple, prayed and fasted.
This is one of those biblical characters that show that in living with people and with God, no skill is as valuable as the talent of waiting. Bible scholars compare Anna to Old Testament "prophets", such as Judith and Deborah. For me, Anna is rather Abraham's friend. A childless man to whom God revealed himself when he was seventy-five years old, promised him a son and an heir, but he did not fulfill his promise until a quarter of a century later. When everyone had lost hope, and the reaction to God's promise of a miracle from time to time was more and more often empty laughter, Abraham wait.
It is not known whether Anna from the temple knew how much her life had to do with the fate of the girl standing in front of her. Less than a year earlier, Mary heard an angel who announced that God would turn her life upside down. He did not leave her, He cannot leave His Son's Mother, but He did not seem to generate any constant miracles, He did not multiply revelations with assurances that everything was going to be well. Mary had to go through thirty years of waiting and asking herself what would happen to her Son. She was at his cruel execution, where angels did not support her and did not console her. Like no one else, she can understand those who have been waiting all their lives for a voice, a clue, and do not see what she has seen: that they have everything enough at their side: God who is man.
The experience of Anna and Simeon is the experience of Mary's whole life in a nutshell. However, this couple sends one more message to the world: both men and women must tell the world about God. For years, the Church's official approach to women was based on the unfortunate phrase of Saint Paul, who insisted that a woman in the Church was to remain silent (cf. 1 Cor 14: 33b-38; 1 Timothy 2:11- 14) while Jesus never preached anything similar. Telling with stubbornness that a woman's mission is to bear children and guard the home hearth is an archaic cultural code, not a Gospel. Women in the Church should preach, read, and govern (including at the level of the Roman Curia). Leave the priesthood to the priests-man but take responsibility for something more than the parish priest's vacuum cleaner (a phrase not mine, but of the Cato feminist)
It is not that God called men to act and women to be objects for man, and a man to enrich women with the seed of truth and wisdom. Anna and Simeon simply remind us that the place of a woman is not only in the pew, and that of a man only in the pulpit. All the women who came out of the pews and all the guys who had the courage to get off the pulpit (if only to turn on the vacuum cleaner) can have a patroness in Anna. I imagine that Jesus, after his death, visiting the Sheol and announcing the good news that it was time to begin the march to heaven, lovingly greeted her, with Simeon and with the little shepherds; people who have proved that the wisest are not the most visible and they are not in the first row to heaven.
Until Tomorrow
fr. george