Improvisational Genius: A Womanist Reading of Anna in Luke 2
The Christmas tale overflows with formidable female exemplars, whose creative faith accelerates the Gospel narrative. While the Virgin Mary and her kinswoman Elizabeth feature prominently, less attention focuses on Anna, an elderly prophetess who encountered the newborn Jesus when he was brought for consecration at the temple. Using a womanist lens, this article examines Anna as an exemplar of the Kwanzaa concept of Kuumba which means creativity. This visionary woman, though often overlooked, provides new insights.
Widow Prophet Beholds the Future
As an aged widow who devoted herself to temple worship, Anna spent her days engaged in spiritual creativity through “fasting and prayer night and day” (Luke 2:37). Transcending tidy wifely roles, Anna improvises a space as mystic seer and holy interpreter, demonstrating female spiritual authority in a male-governed religious domain. Her prophetic tongue pierces the familiar Christmas tale, decoding present circumstances through divine revelation.
The infant Messiah has just been dedicated at the temple when this lone elderly acolyte emerges. The text states she “began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2:38). Rather than a male priest or cleric, God uses this elderly woman to vocalize and affirm the status of Jesus as the promised One. She is the visionary envoy pronouncing the baby’s sacred identity and prophesying the salvation he will catalyze.
Improvisational Genius of Lived Experience
Anna’s decades as widow likely stemmed from an unjust social order, where men monopolized material goods, prestige and self-determination. Such travails etched deep loss and longing onto her soul. Yet from fissures of grief and trauma, Anna, akin to uncounted women through history, composes new creative pathways, improvising sustenance from life’s shards.
Womanist scholars indicate that Black women’s creativity has often been nurtured in high pressure situations that yield an improvisational genius. It’s this ability to create something valuable out of the scraps in life that create a unique legacy for African American women. It is out of the scraps of food from the tables of slave holders, that much of the southern “soul food” cooking emerged. It is from the “scraps” of existence that Black women have provided profound strength and resilience – a strength we also see in a poor widowed woman, named Anna.
Such womanist creativity aligns with bell hooks’ notion of “talking back” and “moving from silence into speech.” (hooks, 1989, p. 9) hooks explains how Black women crafted spaces for self-definition by breaking silences imposed by structures of domination. Anna actualizes such dangerous, transgressive speech; the solitary widow who should be silent instead cries out contrapuntal melodies.
Matriarchal Community Resistance
Mary and Elizabeth's pregnancies link in solidarity, whereas Anna’s barrenness recalls Israel’s longing for social justice. As womanist theology interrogates liberation via the experiences of Black women, Anna's prophetic proclamation resonates.
Anna’s widowhood incurs not starvation but hard-won wisdom from a lifetime of gathering tinder to feed generative flames. For here arrives the infant salvation, and Anna warns none to miss their visitation. Black women's voices, historically discredited, sound the alarm in a slumbering culture.
Heeding such dangerous memory proves demanding emotional labor. Epiphanic light pierces, revealing in stark relief where justice yet remains eclipsed. However, as moral exemplars like Anna attest, prophetic sight evolves not through privilege but through wrestling with lack. Renewed sight emerges on the underside, through improvisation, resilience and holy stubbornness that refuses to relent to silence.
Implications for Contemporary Communities
That resilience continues today. For example, the #SayHerName campaign foregrounds Black women’s stories extinguished through racialized brutality and violence. Anna inspires communal attentiveness to prophetic voices still speaking dangerous truth to power. What creative resistance do overlooked women around us embody?
Cain Hope Felder emphasized the need to “radically question and disable hierarchies” that privilege certain voices and experiences over others (Felder, 1991, p. 12). How might contemporary faith communities spur such prophetic questioning of barriers around race, gender, class, orientation and ability that inhibit full human thriving?
Kuumba demands probing where creativity is crushed rather than nurtured due to unjust systems. Anna models tenacious creativity despite improbability; her holy improvisation offers an Advent summons to reimagine reality’s presumed impossibilities. May communities nurture more fearless prophets, through every loss and silence, speaking bold anthems and liturgies into beloved community.
Dr. CL Nash for the Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2023