Forty days after the Nativity, Mary and Joseph bring the child Jesus to the Temple, as the Law required of every firstborn son. There the aged Simeon, who had been promised he would not die before seeing the Messiah, receives the infant into his arms and blesses God: “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.”
The feast is called the Meeting because in this moment the Old Covenant meets the New. Simeon and the prophetess Anna stand for all the long waiting of Israel, and in the child they hold, that waiting is answered. The one who gave the Law is now carried, as a forty-day-old infant, into His own Temple.
Simeon's words have become the Church's evening prayer, sung at Vespers as the day declines: the recognition that in Christ our own departure can be in peace, because our eyes too have seen salvation. The feast falls on February 2, closing the cycle of the Nativity.