The life of St Anna the Prophetess
When she was eighty-four years old, she happened to be present in the Temple on the day Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus there to be presented according to the Law, the same day the aged Simeon took the child into his arms and spoke of what he recognized in him. Standing nearby, Anna saw in the child what Simeon had seen, and from that day she did not keep the news to herself, speaking openly of it to everyone she met who was still watching and waiting for the deliverance of Israel. Nothing further is recorded of her life beyond this moment, which stands as the whole of what the Gospel preserves of her, a widow's decades of quiet devotion opening at last into a single public testimony that the one Israel had waited for had finally come.
