Thinking about Anna the Prophetess on Mother's Day

It's interesting to arrive at Mother's Day after I've spent time this semester thinking about the depictions of women in the birth narratives of Jesus.  I took a seminary class on Christmas and Easter, and I knew I would need to write a paper.  I thought about Elizabeth, who has been interesting to me for years, as I got older, and I started to realize how few older women are in the narratives of Jesus and how rarely we focus on older people at all.

So, I decided to write about Anna.  Here's what I wrote in part of my final project:

When I think of Anna, I compare her to Elizabeth, who is also very old. For many years, I looked to Elizabeth as a model of a way to be a post-menopausal woman in society. As you know, I think that the Church needs to do more to minister to the spiritual needs of people at midlife, particularly at the far side of midlife, the side that is closer to old age than adolescence. In some ways, Elizabeth is a great example. Finally her deferred dreams come true—how glorious! 

But her story offers a particularly patriarchal fulfillment, in the form of a baby. I do understand the kind of currency that a baby represents in the first century. But it is a vision of wish fulfillment that may not speak to twenty-first century Christians of any gender or age, particularly for those of us who are older. If offered a baby in my old age, a baby that I had to grow in my previously empty womb, I would say no thank you.

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Back to me, writing this blog post.  It seems strange to be sounding anti-mother, on this Mother's Day.  We'll likely hear/read lots of rah-rah posts/sermons/articles on mothers today, and I have nothing against that.  I also suspect we'll hear lots of folks reminding us of how painful the topic of motherhood is and reminding us how many people around us might have tried to have children without success and might have been silent about the subject.  We'll also see/hear plenty about how so many of us nurture, even without biological connection.

But there are plenty of women who don't have much connection with this nurturing angle.  And there are plenty of men who might wonder why we're still so gendered when it comes to this subject.

Let me finish with the conclusion to my seminary project.  It seems a good way of thinking about all these angles:

As you can see, Anna’s story is full of important reminders for us today. If we’re feeling old and washed up, God still has a place for us. If we’re feeling young and insignificant, God has opportunities that the rest of our culture may not offer. No matter how many ways we feel barren, new growth is possible. God’s good news is more inclusive than we dared imagine. And we are at a hinge point of history where it is more important than ever to deliver that good news to a world that is so hungry to hear it.