The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Today we celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. On Dec. 9, 1531, Mary appeared to Juan Diego,  an Aztec Indian and a recent convert to the Catholic faith.  At the time the Aztec people had been conquered by the Spaniards and were being treated harshly.  The bishop himself had been invoking our Blessed Mother asking for help.  But when Juan Diego shared the Blessed Mother’s request with him to have a Church a church built on the hill where she appeared to him in order to thereby  make her Son known and  respond to her children’s petitions,  the bishop initially refused his request and eventually asked for a sign. A sign was given—roses appeared on the hill in the midst of winter. Juan Diego, with Mary’s help, collected a bouquet, wrapped them in his cloak and returned to the bishop. When he opened his cloak, not only was there the miracle of the roses but imprinted on the cloak was the exact replica of Mary as she had appeared to him on that hill.  Needless to say, the bishop repented and built the church as requested by Mary.

 The important message here for us is that God chooses the  lowly,  the marginalized and the oppressed to be His ambassadors, as was Juan Diego, and to be recipients of and  give birth to the Word of God, as did Mary. As Christians we live in a paganistic, secularistic, materialistic and demoralized society.  We are marginalized, shunned, oppressed in a world doing its utmost to shove God out of humankind’s awareness, so now the world says we celebrate the holidays, not the birth of Christ.  As a speaker on religious life recently said to a group of us religious, it is a great time to be in religious life, as we, too, are on the margins where both Juan Diego and our Blessed Mother were in their time on earth. That is the place God chooses for great things to happen.  I believe that we are in the right place and the right time when we experience being the lowliest of the lowly and when we are most vulnerable. It seems that it is during those times that God’s grace breaks through, barren hills are transformed into flower gardens and  ordinary cloaks are changed into manifestations of a divine visitation for those seeking the Lord.