Anna, daughter of Phanuel

I have been reading up on Candlemas (Feb 2) today, a feast I particularly love because one of the blessing prayers mentions the bees.  I am a bit afraid of bees, actually, but I think it is great fun when they are mentioned in church, especially in a solemn way, in Latin.

The Gospel reading is about the purification of Our Lady (after childbirth) and the presentation of Our Lord. It mentions an elderly man and an elderly widow, and although the elderly man composed the Nunc Dimittis on the spot, it is Anna who interests me today.

According to Luke, Anna lived with her husband for seven years before she was widowed.  I don't know why Anna was living in the temple; maybe her husband or her father  had some kind of important temple connection. (Off the top of my head, I would guess it was her father, as Anna is known as the Daughter of Phanuel, not the Widow of Somebody Else.) But at any rate, Anna lived there, praying and fasting, until at least the age of 84.

Now, if Anna married at 14, which would have been perfectly normal for those days, this means she was widowed at 21 and stayed a widow for at least the next fifty-nine years. Presumably she could have married again, but presumably she didn't want to. She was happy in the temple, praying and fasting and doing whatever it may have been that women who lived in the temple were expected to do, and after fifty-nine years of temple living, met Baby Jesus.

That's pretty neat, if you ask me. It's amazing how little space Anna's story has in the Gospel, given its hold on our imaginations. Anna, daughter of Phanuel, tribe of Asher. Widow, aged 87. Married 7 years. Never left temple, worshiped, prayed, fasted. Came to Presentation/Purification ceremony. Recognized Jesus for who He was. Praised and preached. The end--or the beginning, really. Now Anna is one of the most famous women who ever was, for the Bible is the most widely read book there ever has been. More importantly, of course, she got to see Jesus before she died, as an actual baby. Maybe she was allowed to hold him and bounce him up and down. Wouldn't you love to do that?

Anna seems like a serious and single-hearted woman, not given to mourning over what-could-have-been and feeling sorry for herself or envying women with children or any of the temptations adult women give into every day. Those fifty-nine years of  life, though pious, couldn't have been dull. They must have been lived in joyful expectation of something great to come, and lo and behold, He did!

Beyond Single Ladies' Worst Nightmares

You know, I like to emphasize the positive. But sometimes a Single woman is treated so horribly, I am forced to contemplate Single Ladies' Worst Nightmares.

I bet you haven't yet had the one where you go to visit your aged parents for the weekend and gypsies move into your house. Well, voila.

Today feel free to share your worst Single Lady nightmare in the combox. It can be a projected Widow Lady nightmare, too, if that might apply.

As Strong as Death

Yesterday I went for a walk, bought a coffee and sat on a bench by the sea. I thought about the tide and love and gravity and the little dogs running about on the beach. I thought about reality and the illusion of reality. This is not a total cliche when you are 39 years old and squashy.

What I determined, in all these thoughts, was that there are real, solid, permanent loves that affect you invisibly, like the pull of the moon upon the tides, and there are the little crushes, little infatuations that make us run hither and thither like the little dogs on the beach. The solid loves look dull but are as terrible as the grave, and the little crushes look exciting but are basically trivial in themselves.

Crushes are like matches. If you're playing with matches, you light one, it looks pretty, and then it goes out. Sometimes a match lights a warming fire, which is marriage, but unfortunately sometimes it burns down the house, which is your crush ruining your life and perhaps the lives of other people, too. However, both things take fuel. Again, a match on its own is pretty trivial.

Family love is like the moon in that it certainly has an invisible pull and it can seem terrible (terrible as an army with banners) at times. We spend our lives arguing internally with our parents and perhaps also with our brothers, sisters, and children. Families speak languages that no-one else can understand and have dynamics that outsiders cannot see. People panic as they hear themselves sound increasingly like their parents: despite all their attempts to escape mom and dad they find out that, to a certain extent, they are mom and dad.

Family love is the cradle for married love, which also has an invisible pull and can also seem terrible (terrible as an army with banners) at times. It is not the same thing as romantic love; romantic love is its rebellious servant. Married love is as wonderful and terrible as love of one's mother. Incidentally, about 70% of all divorce actions in Scotland are at the instance of wives. Elderly widows, as we know, usually survive widowhood for decades. Elderly widowers usually keel over within a year. Men, often so reluctant to marry, are equally reluctant to allow marriage to stop.

I doubt I'm ever going to blog much on marriage. B.A. is the most patient, tolerant chap alive, and I don't want to take advantage. But I will say that there are terrible moments in which I have to choose between "Non Serviam" and "Serviam" and grace alone gets me to choke out the latter. And no doubt B.A. experiences the same.

Friend love can also exert its pull and be terrible (terrible as an army with banners). However, such friendships are rare--except, and I am guessing, inwar zones, where soldiers put themselves in serious danger ultimately because of their buddies. Women are used to seeing our good friends suffer, and we bring them soup, perhaps, and sometimes we talk about them behind their backs and say "Isn't it a shame?" and "If only she wouldn't bring it on herself!", but sometimes we suffer agonies because our best friend is suffering agonies. We can't even talk about it. At such times, friendship isn't fun, and we're back to the choice between "Serviam" and "Non Serviam."

Then there is romance and flirting and crushes and wit, and these are all very nice, when you don't allow them to muck up your life, but they are really secondary. I wonder, though, if love of romance isn't the biggest marriage killer out there. Men don't read romance novels. Women read romance novels and, in Scotland, 70% of divorce actions are... you know.

But I like romance, just as I like the little dogs that run around on the beach, and I like flirting and crushes and wit. Like novels and paintings they add not a little colour to the strong outlines of life. But in the grander scheme of things, they are just human inventions. They don't really matter. What really matters is family love, married love, friend love and, of course, the love of God, which is truly, truly terrible (terrible as an army with banners) indeed.

Grim Thought

Okay, I know you probably don't want a grim thought. There are enough grim thoughts flying around out there. But this is a helpful grim thought, especially if you are as Single as Single can be.

My helpful grim thought is this: All romantic love leads to either heartbreak or death.

Aaaaah! There. I've said it. The great sucky reality of romantic love. Either the man (or men, let's face it) breaks your heart, or you break his heart, or he dies on you. Of course, you might die on him. But the odds are he's going to die on you 'cause that's what men do, the old so-and-sos!

Since I am married and in love with my husband, since I waited (this time) for the Perfect Man for Me, this dying-before-me thing rather gives me the pip. However, I am determined to make sure I do my bit to get B.A. into heaven, and hopefully I will get in myself eventually, and then that dying thing won't matter so much.

Still, if/when it happens, it will suck. I'm hoping we die simultaneously, martyred by religious fanatics while on a "In the Steps of Saint Paul" pilgrimage-tour in Turkey when we are 80. However, you don't get to choose these things. Oh dear!

These are not good thoughts to have when you are across a whole ocean from your husband, incidentally. Here's a fun video, one of my favourites, to cheer us all up:

A Widow

Every January 21, I think about a little widow in a trench coat and beret. Every Sunday for many years, she walked or took a bus to my street, chatting with the driver, and came clicking along the road in her boots or high-heeled sandals to my house. At first her hair was dyed a uniform silver, and at last it was white as the filling of the vanilla cream cookies she brought with her.

This was my grandmother Gladys. She was widowed at 60 and lived to be 86. For 26 years, she was my principal model for the Single Life.

Grandma had been happily married, and Grandpa had been her constant companion. They had had only one child, and perhaps it was this situation that left them so free for vacation travel and sociability. Widowhood was a terrible shock to my grandmother, and it was said that she had had a nervous breakdown. I don't remember this time particularly well, having been only four. I seem to remember being in a hospital waiting room as my very pregnant mother went upstairs to her father, leaving me and my brother with my father, but memory is a funny thing.

I remember with more authority my grandmother's weekly Sunday visits. When my grandfather was alive, we all went to their house for Sunday dinner. Now Grandma came to us, bringing store-bought cookies wrapped, two in a package, in paper towel. It was years before I lost the taste for these objects which, for at least ten years, tasted faintly of cigarette smoke. Grandma was a cheerful Sunday addition, at first arriving when the rest of us were at Sunday evening Mass. Grandma, mysteriously, was a Protestant and never went to church.

She officially didn't babysit, either, although she must have, if only very occasionally, for I remember her weak threat to "skelp" us, a linguistic leftover from her family's Edinburgh past. But mostly she didn't, because of her Nerves.

"Oh," Grandma would say, her habitual cheerfulness momentarily vanishing, like the sun disappearing under a cloud, "my Nerves."

I have Nerves, too, so in hindsight I sympathize. It isn't easy having Nerves. And I might have thought, as a divorcee, that I had better reason for Nerves than Grandma, who at least had a nice house, a pension, a daughter and five bonny grandchildren.

Grandma worried about my divorce, especially since I was Catholic. She had got it into her head that Catholics could never, under any circumstance, marry again after a divorce and, like many a Protestant, could not get her mind around the theological gymnastics of the annulment procedure. She feared I would be perpetually lonely, and she advised me to turn to the radio for solace.

"It has always been company for me," she said.

But she certainly had more than the radio. She had her friends, who volunteered with her at the local nursing home. She had her Saturday raids on K-Mart, searching for bargains and doing her Christmas shopping months in advance. She went to a seniors' centre, where she took exercise classes and may have played cards. She had her hair set and her nails done. She did not date. She had no interest in remarriage, although her sparkling personality attracted the odd widower here and there, who invited her for coffee in the McDonald's closest to the cemetery the local widowed frequented.

And, of course, she had us, and as we were so many, we provided a lot to think about even though, taken altogether, we were too much for her Nerves. Eventually we visited her singly or in pairs at the same nursing home she had volunteered at. It was only three blocks or so from our house.

"My grandchildren keep me young," she said. Her one wedding photo, taken on the steps of a United Church (a union of Canadian Presbyterians & Methodists), was pinned to the bulletin board behind her bed.

When she died (liver cancer, and quick), a thread to my childhood, and no doubt my mother's childhood, was broken. But because she was so much a part of the family, because her visits for so many years had been weekly, memory of her is deeply layered in my mind. The sight of anyone smoking in a kitchen or sitting room is enough to bring her, the only open smoker in the family, back.

Young, suave man: Do you mind if I smoke?

Seraphic: Oh, please do! It reminds me of my grandmother.

Young, suave man: Slightly annoyed look.

But sometimes I need no trigger. Snatches of a song she used to sing as she swept the kitchen table, made a cup of tea or taught me the foxtrot just come bubbling up to the surface of my mind:

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.
I'm half crazy all for the love of you.
It won't be a stylish marriage-
I can't afford a carriage.
But you'd look sweet upon the seat
of a bicycle built for two.

My great regret is that she didn't live long enough to meet Benedict Ambrose. She would have been tremendously pleased that (despite being Catholic) I was going to marry a Scottish boy and go to live in Edinburgh.