Second Saturday of Advent: Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe
There's a commonality to all visitation: the element of surprise, the doubt, and then, finally, acceptance. Both the Supreme Being and Mary tend to spring on unsuspecting people as they relate news that affects millennia.
Advent is a time of preparation for the unexpected, the soothing, the awakening to the world of forgiveness and love. In Advent, the Divine appears to Mary, announcing her role as carrier of their divinity's humanization in a child's form. The Divine as flesh, as thought, made concrete. It is hope and celebration. It is humility and pride.
For all accounts over time and history, Mary decides to follow the Divine's steps and use temporal contact at times of need and hopelessness. However, many appearances Mary has made over the last two millennia we will never know, but at least two stand front and center, her conversations with Juan Diego, an indigenous convert to Catholicism, and her conversations with the children of Fatima.
Her conversations with Juan Diego at the beginning of Mexico's colonization serve as a note to the hope a child can hold for a past forever gone and a future full of hope. They give the people of Mexico an anchor to understand the importance of hope in a world rapidly changing around them. I would add as an aside that it is a bit capricious of our mother, Mary, to request a shrine, but then who am I to question a woman dished by patriarchy to secondary status even when she was the vessel to that which they revere?
La Guadalupana, as she is affectionately known to her devotees, brings promise and confidence to the people of the Americas. She browns a growing whitening of Jesus, who by ethnic definition looked more like the child Mary bore than the man Catholics of the time (and today) adored.
In this time of Advent, let us look at Juan Diego and La Guadalupana as tools of our aspirations to overcome illness, be humble in the face of change, and stay determined in our belief in a gracious Divine.
