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I owe St. Anne a lot.
When I was facing seemingly intractable problems in my life and the lives of my family, I prayed novenas to St. Anne and saw the most remarkable answers to prayer in my life.
Her husband is a model also, but in praying novenas to St. Anne, I found what John-Paul and Annie Deddens, proprietors of the “Pray More Novenas” website found.
“I prayed this St. Anne Novena in hopes of finding a husband,” said Annie. “Shortly after praying it, I met my future husband, John-Paul. I felt like St. Anne was watching over me.”
Me too. It led me to learn more about one of my best friends in heaven, St. Anne.
First, patience is her most important virtue.
The story of St. Anne, the mother of Mary, isn’t told in the New Testament. Instead it is found in apocryphal texts that are not very reliable. But in tradition, Mary’s mother has been venerated in both the East and West from the early Church to today.
The story goes, Anne prayed fervently for a child but remained childless into old age. St. John Damascene’s words about what happened next are featured in the Catholic Breviary: “Rejoice, Ann, that you were sterile and have not borne children … you gave birth to a daughter nobler than the angels!”
So, as much as I appreciate having seen immediate answers to my own prayers with her, I am moved by how the daily St. Anne’s novena prayer asks for the grace to “wait with patience, perseverance in faith and hope, and with absolute trust in the Lord’s plan for me,” as St. Anne did.
As St. Anne’s great devotee St. Teresa of Avila put it, “Patience achieves everything.”
Second, St. Anne is defined by the Immaculate Conception.
The Immaculate Conception isn’t the conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit, it is Mary’s conception by Joachim and Anna. As Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854:
“The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.”
Eastern Churches have a robust understanding of what happened in the womb of St. Anne, saying that Mary was formed “free from any stain of sin, as though fashioned by the Holy Spirit and formed as a new creature.”
The conclusion we can reach is not only that Mary was carefully singled out by God — but Anne was carefully chosen also.
Third: That means we can imagine what kind of mother St. Anne was.
Psychological studies show the enormous impact mothers — and therefore also St. Anne — have on their children.
St. Anne gave Mary her self-concept. The internal self-talk we have is often our mother's words of support or discouragement. We know what Mary's "self-talk" was because she voiced it out loud, saying that “all generations will call me blessed” — while never forgetting that she was a “lowly servant,” the handmaiden of the Lord. We can hear the echo of her mother’s wisdom in Mary’s words.
St. Anne equipped Mary to handle her emotions. Mothers teach emotional regulation to their children. So I like to think it was St. Anne that made Mary so straightforward about how she was feeling, as we see at the Finding in the Temple, and able to bear true sorrow with real strength, as we see at the foot of the cross.
St. Anne also made Mary fearless. Mothers are also often the origin of the confidence or fear we have toward the world outside our home, and so St. Anne’s influence is probably there in the way Mary confidently but humbly takes charge at Cana, when she directs her doubting family to Jesus, and when she gathers the new Church around her at Pentecost.
Fourth: Most importantly, St. Anne’s virtues reach us through her grandson.
The cultural significance of abuelas, babushkas, or nanas is clear from Chinese homes to tribal cultures — and popular studies suggest that this hasn’t changed in America or worldwide.
Grandmothers teach us how to love, how to be men or women, and how to be faithful to our cultural and religious traditions. We know that it was in Nazareth that Jesus learned the virtues that would save the world at Gethsemane. He learned them from Mary and Joseph, chiefly — but if it is true that his life and his grandmother’s overlapped, then she played a big role, as well.
So, if you haven’t yet, introduce yourself to my friend, St. Anne.
I pray that she will do for you what she has done for the Holy Family, and for my family too.
