Our next icon encounter is by Susan Holman:
I walk through life in a particular mindfulness of several women saints from the ancient world. She who has dwelt longest in my thinking is Anna, the prophet we meet in Luke 2:36-38, the story of Jesus as an infant presented in the Temple. Anna is literally introduced as an “add-on” in the holy family’s encounter with the pious layman Simeon (Luke 2:25-35);verse 36 in the Greek begins with the word “and” (και), usually translated, “There was also a prophet, Anna…” In the Feast of the Presentation and the iconography it is Simeon’s beautiful Nunc Dimittis prayer and “word”to Mary that gets the most attention. But when we look at the details of the story itself, Simeon is described as basically a pious guy who lives somewhere in the neighborhood, and who more or less happens to wander in off the street that day (albeit impelled by the Holy Spirit). Anna, in contrast, was there all along. It is Anna the respectable widow, connected with a known Jewish family, whose body has been praying and fasting in and around this holy space for maybe sixty years. And while Simeon speaks to God and to Mary, it is Anna who, as the stated prophet in the text, does the preaching: “She began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.” (Luke 2:38).
For me, the image that best “gets” the strong and fearless presence of this woman, vibrantly alive to God and to the community still in her eighties, is a ca. tenth-century manuscript illumination from the Menologion of Basil II (Vat. Gr1613, below). Here she stands ramrod-straight on the right, holding writing material in one hand as the otherpoints to heaven. How often do we notice that this story inverts normative gender expectations: it is the old woman whose word reaches the people even as it is the man who eagerly reaches out to hold the baby?
Throughout my spiritual journeying, it has often been aged women—sometimes very aged indeed—who most inspire and model for me God-breathed courage—often with a zesty humor and grace. One wise and urbane spiritual ‘mother’ (still driving months before she died at 96)“spoke” to me three years later, her astonishing smile on another (very old) woman’s face clinching my decision for chrismation. My Orthodox godmother, today a spry 93, was the oldest-ever Peace Corps volunteer. My spiritual director, a nun in her 80s speaks through her graceful silent commitment to contemplative prayer. And the woman most responsible for what some might call my “coming to faith”—a fiery Harvard Business School redhead who was like a second mother in high school—continues to point boldly to God to all she meets in her ninth decade. While I may or may not live as long as these life-changing spiritual mentor
Image taken from Wikimedia Commons, Menologion of Basil II. For a more detailed version see the original manuscript at the Vatican, search for page 365 of: https://digi.vatlib.it/view/