A Birthday Love Letter to Our Lady – September 8
Written by: James Dacey, Jr. OFS

Somewhere in Jerusalem, on a day nobody wrote down, and no one could have known mattered, yet a little girl was born. There was no fanfare. No star in the sky, no shepherds, no angels singing over the rooftops, that would come later, for her Son. Just an older couple who had prayed for years for a child they’d nearly given up hoping for, and a baby girl in her mother’s arms at last. And yet, of every birth in the history of the world except One, this is the birth the whole Church still stops to celebrate. Because the moment Mary drew her first breath, everything that was coming the angel, the yes, the manger, the cross, all of it, quietly began.

Her parents were Joachim and Anne, and by the time she came, they had already spent a lifetime waiting.¹ They were an older couple, married many years, and childless, the kind of quiet sorrow that never fully leaves a home. Joachim loved God so deeply that when the weight of it became too much to carry, he went out alone into the desert and fasted there forty days and nights, praying the same prayer over and over: he would not eat, he would not drink, until God looked upon him.² Anne prayed too, back home, promising that if a child ever came, she would give that child back to God with her whole heart, holding nothing back. And then, in the same breathtaking moment, an angel came to each of them, to Anne first, and then to Joachim out among his flocks, carrying the very same news: your prayer has been heard. After all those years of silence, heaven finally answered.³

Picture this blessed scene: Joachim coming down from the hills, hurrying now, his flocks trailing behind him, his heart pounding with news he could hardly believe. And Anne, who could have waited quietly inside, ran instead, out through the city gate, arms open, and threw them around her husband’s neck before he’d even said a word.⁴ Two people who had carried their grief separately for so long, suddenly wrapped up in the same joy at the same moment. It’s such a tender picture that artists have been painting it for seven hundred years; that embrace at the gate has appeared in churches and chapels across the world, because something about it just captures what hope finally answered actually looks like.⁵ Not a quiet relief. A running, weeping, can’t-hold-it-in kind of joy. And nine months later, in that same home in Jerusalem, Mary was born.

The Church has marked this birthday for well over a thousand years, going back to a church built in Jerusalem on the very spot where tradition says Joachim and Anne’s home once stood.⁶ And there’s something quietly beautiful about where September 8 sits on the calendar: exactly nine months after December 8, the day we celebrate her being conceived without sin.⁷ Two dates, nine months apart, telling one continuous story: her beginning, and then her birth, just like any child, except this child would one day carry God Himself inside her. Pope Paul VI once called this day “the dawn of salvation,” and it’s hard to think of a better way to say it.⁸ Nothing about that first morning looked like the start of the world’s rescue. It looked like an ordinary birth, in an ordinary home, to two ordinary parents who had simply never stopped believing God was listening. And that’s usually how God works, quietly, in the ordinary, until one day you look back and realize the ordinary was never ordinary at all.

That’s the whole heart of it, really; she was never the destination. She was always the way there. “Per Mariam ad Jesum,” the old phrase goes To Jesus, through Mary.⁹ Every soul who has ever given their life over to serving her has discovered the same thing: that loving her doesn’t pull you away from Christ; it walks you straight to Him, the way a mother has always known exactly how to lead a child home. The Legion of Mary prays an antiphon that could have been written for this very day: “Who is she that comes forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun?” And the answer they give back is simple: “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.”¹⁰ On her birthday, that’s still the only fitting response. Not just admiration from a distance, but recourse, running to her, the way Anne once ran to Joachim at the gate, certain that whatever we’re carrying, she already knows the way through it. Because she always leads us to Jesus. She always has and she always will.

Happy birthday, dear Mother.

Thank you for the day you were born,
and for every day since that you have never
once stopped watching over us.
Thank you for saying yes, so completely,
so that Jesus could come to us through you.
Lead us always to your Son, today and every day,
until we meet you both face to face. Amen.

Sources

1. The story of Joachim and Anne comes from the Protoevangelium of James, a 2nd-century apocryphal text not included in Scripture but long received by the Church as pious tradition; see Franciscan Media, “Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” franciscanmedia.org, and EWTN, “The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” ewtn.com.

2. Protoevangelium of James, 4:1–2, trans. Alexander Walker, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886).

3. Protoevangelium of James, 4:2–4.

4. The meeting and embrace of Joachim and Anne at Jerusalem’s gate is a traditional scene drawn from the Protoevangelium of James and later accounts including the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1260).

5. The scene, known as “Joachim and Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate,” became a popular subject in Christian art, notably Giotto’s fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (c. 1305).

6. Vatican News, “Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” vaticannews.va; Vatican State, “8 September: Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” vaticanstate.va.

7. Franciscan Media, “Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” franciscanmedia.org; EWTN, “The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” ewtn.com.

8. Pope Paul VI, Marialis Cultus (1974), quoted in “Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary – Dawn of Salvation,” National Shrine of Mary, Mother of the Church, thenationalshrineofmarymotherofthechurch.com.

9. “Per Mariam ad Jesum” (“To Jesus through Mary”) reflects the Marian spirituality of St. Louis Marie de Montfort, foundational to the Legion of Mary; Legion of Mary Handbook, legionofmary.ie.

10. The Catena Legionis (Chain of the Legion), the daily prayer of the Legion of Mary, opens with this antiphon and response; Legion of Mary Prayers, legionofmaryottawa.com.