The church year opens, in September, with the birth of the one through whom salvation would come. Mary is born to Joachim and Anna, a righteous couple who had grown old without children and had prayed long for a child. Her birth is the answer to that prayer, and the beginning of the answer to a longer waiting, the whole hope of Israel for the Messiah.
The Church calls her the dawn before the Sun of Righteousness. She is not the source of the light, but the one who first bears it; her nativity is kept because in her the human race prepares the dwelling place for God. The feast honours her not apart from Christ but entirely toward Him: everything she is, she is for Him.
That this is the first of the Twelve Great Feasts, standing near the year's beginning on September 8, is itself a teaching: the story of our salvation begins not with power but with the quiet birth of a child long prayed for, in an ordinary and faithful home.