July 26, 2018 9:00am

Saint Mary Parish, Pylesville

Today we honor Saints Joachim and Anne, the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

There is no mention of them in any Scripture text.

We get their names from a non-Biblical book.

But because they are the parents of Mary, even though we know nothing else about them, we honor them as saints and celebrate them today.

Maybe in honoring them, we honor parents in general.

And we especially honor parents who, like Joachim and Anne, are ordinary, everyday, faithful, dutiful persons and not well-known:

parents who have sleepless nights, tending a sick child;

parents who get the children off to school, commute to work, stop at the supermarket to pick up a few things, get the kids to their soccer game or dance class, fix dinner, get the kids to bed, and then fall into bed themselves, exhausted;

parents who, by their own example, instill good habits and values in their children.

I am thinking that these are the parents we honor and pray for in celebrating Mary’s parents today.

One other thought.

It seems to me that Mary must have learned and developed her own wonderful traits from her parents:

her faithfulness and trust in God, her humility, and her self-sacrificing spirit.

We see these traits in Mary and they, I believe, tell us something of what her parents, Joachim and Anne, must have been like.