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The Nuclear Family in Liturgical Perspective - Reflections on the Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple - by Grace Hibshman
***Grace Hibshman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches virtue ethics and writes about forgiveness. She and her husband attend St. Elizabeth the New Martyr Orthodox Church in Chesterton, IN.
Our current culture wars tend to divide people into two camps. In the one camp, there are those in favor of abortion, gay marriage, no-fault divorce, transgender identities, etc. In response, the other camp tends to indiscriminately champion the traditional nuclear family. The Church often gets lumped into the latter camp; however, she hasn’t always operated out of our current cultural categories.
It is an under–appreciated fact that every year the Church asks us to commemorate the separation of a nuclear family. During the Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokoks into the Temple, we celebrate the faithfulness of Joachim and Anna, who offered their three-year-old daughter—their only daughter, for whom they prayed for many years—to be raised in the Temple by other people. The hymns do not depict them grieving, however. Rather, they describe them dancing and leaping for joy. And we, as a Church, join them in their gladness.
But while the hymns never ascribe sorrow to Joachim and Anna, they do to the mothers amongst us:
Today let us, the arrays of the assembled faithful, triumph in spirit…Ye mothers, setting aside every sorrow, follow them in gladness, singing the praises of her who became the mother of God…
Mothers today do not give away their toddlers to be raised at church, but from the first time a mother brings her child to church, she is asked to literally give her child up. The priest takes them from her hands, lays them on the floor in front of the altar, and leaves them there alone before God. When the child is baptized and Chrismated, the parents will hand their child off again, this time to the godparents. For many adult converts, Chrismation marks an even starker departure from family.
Some icons of the Entrance (such as the one below) depict the event like a Chrismation. The parents, Joachim and Anna, stand back. Instead of them, two sponsors holding candles escort Mary to the priest, who welcomes her to a red altar flanked by what look to be royal doors. Inside the sanctuary, a piece of bread, fashioned conspicuously like prosphora, is fed to her literally “upborn by an angelic host.”
The readings for the feast day explicitly challenge the primacy of family. The Gospel features the story of Mary and Martha. Martha entreats Christ, “Do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?” (Lk. 10:40, NKJV) Christ affirms that Mary has chosen the one thing needful, which (unlike family) shall never be taken away from her. Appended to this story is Christ’s later exchange with the woman who declared “Blessed is the womb that bore You.” (Lk. 11:27) In response, he declares “More than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” (Lk. 11:28) The psalm verses between the epistle and the Gospel features verses from Ps. 44, including “Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear” (12a). The second half of that verse reads: “and forget thine own people and thine father’s house” (12b).
But while the feast day challenges the primacy of family, it does not dismiss its importance. In the Gospel reading, Christ does not say that Mary should never help her sister Martha, nor does he deny that his mother is blessed for having born him. After churching and baptism, the newly born are handed back to their parents, and after Chrismation, the newly re-born usually still belong to their non-Orthodox families. The feast, after all, is a Marian feast and what makes Mary the Theotokos is that she gave birth to God in the flesh. It’s also a feast that celebrates Joachim and Anna, whom we commemorate in the Divine Liturgy as the “grandparents of God.” As we move through Advent into Christmas, the significance of Christ’s ancestry becomes even more central. At the beginning of Advent, we celebrate the Theotokos’departurefrom her parents, but the last Sunday of Advent the Gospel reading is none other than the genealogy of Christ, i.e., his family tree. Central to the mystery we celebrate at Christmas is the reality that God was born into a human family, with parents and grandparents and great grandparents.
It would be a mistake therefore to think that the Church were saying that biological family is unimportant. I have two theories about what she is saying instead. The first is that earthly family is not needful, by which I mean that to be blessed, you don’t need to have a certain kind of family, nor does having a certain kind of family necessarily make you blessed. Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it, which includes sheltering the widows and orphans, the afflicted and the poor.
The second is that the life of the family is only blessed insofar as it is ordered toward and within the greater family of the Church. Mary’s role in the Church included literal separation from her family, first from her parents, and later from her child. It also included her being betrothed to a man who was much older than her, which resulted in her becoming a widow. Most people’s vocations do not include this much separation from family. But on some level, every parent needs to give their child up to Christ and the Church. Likewise, every child needs to make the Church their true Mother and God their true Father.
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A very "contemporary" and creative theological reflection on the Feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God Into the Temple. An "inclusive" reflection that supports the nuclear family and those outside of that reality.
