26 July 2018
Memorial of Saints Joachim and Anne, Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Anne and Joachim (Yearning & Grace)
In Jeremiah 2 the Lord rebukes his people not only for having forsaken the Lord, the source of living water, but also for having dug cisterns to store the water that they presume to already have, and for which reason they consider the source superfluous. In fact, the cisterns hold no water at all since they are broken. We find the same idea in the rebuke to the Church of Laodicea in Revelations 3:17: “you say ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.’” In either case, the people do not want what the Lord can offer—the living water—because they think that they already have everything they need already, and they do not need an external source that they presume would reduce them to dependence. Grace—which always comes from without—seems like an oppressive idea to them, one that they imagine takes away their presumed independence. They have no yearning because they have no need. There is nothing to convert to because they think that their cistern is full and that there is no better situation.
This attitude seems common today, especially among certain people with a materialistic or reductively scientific mindset; but it was already common among the people of Israel in the time of Jeremiah, and we find it among the scribes and the Pharisees of Jesus’s time. Nonetheless, during these periods there always remained the “poor of Israel” who hungered and thirsted for a righteousness that could only be offered by the source of living water itself. Saints Joachim and Anne were among this number, and Mary is the perfect heir of this faithful remnant. Even before his conversion, Ignatius felt a yearning for greater things, but he did not look for it in the sole source of living water but rather in the riches, honor, and pride that he intended to gather for his own “cistern.” After his conversion, however, he discovered his own spiritual poverty and realized that the solution was not to try to fill his cistern with “spiritual riches” such that he could ever claim to have personal spiritual “qualities” of which he could boast. Rather, Ignatius realized that God instead wished that he depend entirely on grace, which can never be gathered to fill a container, but which must be freely received and immediately given away in every instant. We have never “arrived” (and to think so is delusion) but are always hanging upon God’s grace. “Give me only your love and your grace, for that is enough for me and I ask for nothing more” (SpEx 234).