I understand that Mary actually lived in the Temple as a child, grew up there, until she was married. I can’t imagine what she would have spent her childhood doing, other than learning the Sacred Scriptures, and learning to read and write. Was she one of several Temple Virgins? (as opposed to pagan temple prostitutes) What would she have done all day and night? I know there would have been prayer and devotion…but I just picture she was a little girl, along with possibly other little girls who would grow to become consecrated virgins, living in that grand place with bearded, robed priests. I’ve just always wondered how this kind of life would have been for her. Does anyone know? One thing I love about this forum is that there always seems to be someone who can shed light on the unknown.
Your final question is an understandable one. It is one that can be answered more easily than it could be understood and appreciated by the contemporary person, if I may say.
From the perspective of latter second temple period Judaism, it is hard to overemphasise the importance of the temple. One repeatedly confronts this. So many aspects of Jewish liturgical life find a reflection in Catholic thought, in Catholic liturgics and in Catholic theology…and yet, because of the temple’s singularity (in view of the suppression of Josiah) there is something that defies translation from their circumstances to ours. There is more to it than that…but I won’t digress.
It was also a very different society and a different culture. Even if one is not a subscriber to J,E,P, and D, the strata of the sacred texts indicate that whether the temple is the residence of a fullness of the Divine Presence, the Shekinah, or the place where the Name of the Lord will reside, to be associated with it intimately was a privilege that it would be hard to find a contemporary comparison or analogy.
Recently, we had the Olympics. I was watching young girls, gymnasts, whose youth was devoted to and focused upon this achievement…years of work, years of sacrifice, all the effort necessary to be in this inner cadre of a small team chosen for the Olympics. A success will put them in a singular place. I still remember American gymnasts and ice skaters from half a century ago.
Joachim and Anne would have seen such dedication and sacrifice – and a reward of medals – as vain and empty in comparison to an association with the Temple of the Living God. I don’t know if that offers you any insight.
The same is true in subsequent centuries in the early and not so early Church with the
oblati…the children who were oblates in a monastery for some number of years. I think most parents today would find it unimaginable to give their young children to this purpose in view of how we see life, how we see childhood, how we see growing up, how we see progression to adulthood. and to a career and “life.”
But the views and expectations in each of these points were different for parents in “the Age of Faith,” when this occurred…in a way not dissimilar to Joachim and Anne.
These were children who resided in the one great center of culture and repository of human learning and knowledge in their whole sphere of lived experience…the monastery. Architecturally splendid, technically superb, self-contained and self-sustaining. It would give them remarkable human opportunities, yes. But much more than human excellence, it was
the school of saints.
And that, after all, was what mattered most in life in that era – and what everything else in life was about attaining. Learning and education – such as it was before the advent of the colleges and universities and even before the cathedral schools – was oriented toward the sacred sciences.
These children, for this opportunity, would know the faith better, the language of prayer better, the practical path to holiness better by this providential good fortune to live as an oblate in the monastery. Perhaps the child and the monastery might even ultimately decide that the monastic life was even the child’s vocation.
How would Joachim and Anne and Mary have seen the experience? Well, to understand it, you would have to have their mind and worldview and you would have to look at it through the lenses by which they understood and processed human life, humanity, religion and what was of value and significance…as opposed to what wasn’t.
