Feast day: November 21
The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
An ancient feast, drawn from early tradition, recalling the child Mary being presented and dedicated to God in the Temple — her whole life given over to the Lord from the start.
The feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated on November 21, honors the tradition that the child Mary was brought by her parents to the Temple in Jerusalem and there presented and dedicated to the service of God. Like the feasts of Mary's birth and of her parents Joachim and Anne, it draws not on the Gospels but on an early Christian writing of the second century, the 'Protoevangelium of James,' and on the devotion that grew from it.
By that pious tradition, Joachim and Anne — who had received Mary as a longed-for gift in their old age — brought her as a small girl to the Temple to fulfill a vow, offering her wholly to God, and there she was received and remained, growing up in the precincts of the holy place, given over entirely to prayer and to the Lord from her earliest years.
The feast is much older and more solemn in the Christian East, where it is one of the great festivals of the year, called the 'Entrance of the Most Holy Mother of God into the Temple.' It was gradually adopted in the West, where it has been kept for many centuries.
What the Church celebrates is not so much an event that can be dated as a truth about Mary's whole life: that she was consecrated to God from the very beginning, her existence a complete and total gift of self to him long before the angel came to Nazareth. In honoring the child Mary given to the Temple, the faithful are invited to renew their own dedication of themselves to God.
The feast comes from a second-century story of Mary's parents bringing her as a small girl to be raised in the Temple — her life consecrated before she could speak.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/12400a.htm
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