Saint Joachim

The four canonical Gospels never record the couple’s names. We know Saint Joachim through an ancient Christian tradition, and we remember him with gratitude as the father who stood behind Our Lady, respecting the silences history has left.

In that ancient story, Joachim is a devout, fairly well-off and generous man who regularly gave double offerings to the Temple and was open-handed with the poor. He and his wife Anne lived together for many years without a single child.

On a great feast day, as he came forward with his offering, a man named Reuben blocked his way and rebuked him: a man with no child to carry on his line, he said, was not worthy to stand among those bringing gifts to God, as if childlessness were a public sign of God’s disapproval.

That is how popular tradition tells it; it is not a careful historical record. But the pain in the story rings piercingly true: a man judged and despised for something beyond his control, then pushed aside in the very place where he most wanted to draw close to God.

The forty days and nights echo the great trials of salvation history: Moses on Mount Sinai, Israel wandering in the desert, Jesus himself fasting in the wilderness before he began to preach. Joachim is shown as a man who laid all his humiliation and helplessness before the Lord and waited patiently there, before any ray of hope had appeared.

At home, Anne carried the same pain and prayed earnestly, though her husband was not there to bear it with her. Far apart, husband and wife ached and prayed for the same thing. The longing for a child was not only a woman’s private grief; the man carried that burden too, only more quietly: not weeping aloud, but going far away to face his pain alone.

Picturing Joachim in the wilderness, we may think of so many fathers and husbands around us. They seldom speak of their pain or helplessness. People tend to see only how well they earn a living and carry the family’s burdens, while deep down they too face dead ends where there is nothing to do but wait.

Joachim in the ancient story brought that very helplessness into his prayer. He did not hold every outcome in his hands; he simply stood before God with the very real emptiness in his life.

Painters of old, from Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel to Dürer’s woodcuts centuries later, often set this tender meeting before an ancient gate of Jerusalem that the Jews called the “Gate of Mercy.” The name is only a coincidence of history, yet it suits the story strangely well: a meeting born of the very mercy the couple had prayed for through so many weary years.

Over the centuries that image has become part of Christian liturgy and art: two people who had come through bitter, humiliating days together, now walking hand in hand into a new season of hope.

Some time later, Anne gave birth to a baby girl, and the couple named her Mary. Tradition sees the simple joy of that small home as the quiet preparation for the greatest calling any human being has ever received.

When Mary was three, the couple brought her up to the Temple in Jerusalem to present her. The story paints a small child’s unsteady steps, the flickering lamps of the Temple, and the parents’ joy mixed with heartache as they watched her walk away into other hands. It is the language of popular devotion, but it carries a deep truth: children are gifts from God. Parents must love and raise them, but they must also learn to open their hands so their children can follow the calling God has prepared for them, even when it breaks the parents’ hearts.

The Church celebrates Saint Joachim together with Saint Anne on July 26 each year. Keeping the feast together, rather than separating the father’s part from the mother’s, keeps whole the picture of a holy family in which devout parents nurture a child’s calling.

For Vietnamese Catholics, devotion to Saint Joachim is closely bound up with filial piety and gratitude toward grandparents and elders: people who spent their lives faithfully keeping the family’s ways, taking their grandchildren to Mass every Sunday morning, and quietly sacrificing everything so that those who came after them might have a brighter future.

Some fathers never live to see how their children’s lives turn out. Some grandfathers are remembered only for a short piece of advice, an upright way of living, the habit of praying the Rosary before the family altar every night before bed. That quiet presence goes on sheltering later generations, even when they no longer clearly remember his face.