Nativity of the Theotokos

The Church year has only just begun, and its first great feast tells of no king and no victory, but of an elderly couple who asked God for the same thing for half a century and received no answer.

Joachim and Anna were known in Jerusalem as righteous and not poor: a third of their income went to the temple, a third to the destitute. But they had no children, and in Israel childlessness was read as a sign of God's displeasure. One day the high priest refused Joachim's offering — a childless man had no right to bring a gift on behalf of the people. Joachim did not argue. He went out to the shepherds in the wilderness and fasted there for forty days, while Anna wept in her garden before a bird's nest: even the birds have young.

The answer came to them separately and in the same hour. An angel told each of them that a daughter would be born to them, and that the whole world would speak of her. So Mary was born in Nazareth.

Why the feast matters

The Church calls this day the beginning of our salvation. The story of Christ's Nativity does not start in the cave at Bethlehem but here, in the house of two old people who had stopped hoping — which is why the feast opens the yearly cycle.

Not a line of it is written in the Gospels. It was kept by Tradition, the memory of a Church that remembers her own long before anyone writes them down.

The icon

The icon shows an ordinary room. Anna reclines on a bed, servants bring her food and drink, and below the newborn Mary is being washed. No radiance, no ranks of angels: a quiet domestic scene with the whole future hidden inside it.

How it is kept

September 21 (September 8 on the old calendar), with an all-night vigil the evening before. When the feast falls on a Wednesday or Friday the fast is relaxed and fish is permitted. The afterfeast continues until September 25.

Your Nativity, O Virgin Theotokos, has proclaimed joy to the whole universe; for from you dawned the Sun of Righteousness, Christ our God, who annulled the curse, bestowed the blessing, and abolished death, granting us eternal life.