This is Real Christianity. Really.

For a while now I have had a picture of Mary in my Liturgy of the Hours volumes. I kept it placed next to The Magnificat (the prayer/exclamation of Mary when she visited Elizabeth and which we, today, pray every evening). It has been a pleasant reminder that these words which we pray and which are written in Luke were said by a real person at a real time and facing real, human experiences-- like carrying a child at a time when carrying a child was hardly convenient.


I haven't known much about Mary as she is known in this picture: as Our Lady of Guadalupe. I don't suspect there is a vast majority of people who know of her, much less know her-- and even fewer outside of Mexico know of her by this name. Even more, I'm sure there are many who balk at my title of this entry, Real Christianity, when I immediately dive into an image of Mary.

"There he goes again, a Catholic worshipping Mary..." "Isn't Christianity about Christ?"

Yes. Christianity is about Christ. ... And all the things Christ did... and all the people he met and healed and spoke with... and commissioned. It would seem that, if we should want to know more about Christ, we should get to know better his mother. Anyone who has been over to the Gerber household has learned a lot about me just by sitting down and having a chat with my mother. I don't mind that people have talked with my mom. Usually that's a sign that I have a good friendship with them anyway. So it goes with talking to Mary....

At any rate, one of the things which Christ did was to come to save the world (ahem... duh). But, this was new at the time. The Jews thought the Messiah was coming just for them. Yet Jesus arrives on the scene and brings salvation to Jews and Gentiles-- that is, to the whole world. In order to do this, he appealed to the very core of our human person: our heart, our soul, our body, our mind.

He entered into the human drama not as some overbearing Being, but as... well... one of us. (Now, don't get me wrong, he was still God-- and even creation itself reflected it: in celestial events around his birth, earthquakes at his death, and inexplainable miracles in-between). But when we think about it, the fact that he came as one of us is pretty amazing: not only does it tell us about Who God is, it also tells us a lot about How God works:

He is personal. He gets into the middle of the fray. He is truly concerned with our well-being. And He chooses to be born of a woman-- to have a mother.

He didn't have to have a mom. He could have been anything and done anything-- anything!-- else. But he chose to have a mom. Enter, stage right, Mary.

"My soul magnifies the Lord," she says, "and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior." God is her savior, she says (and thus implying that she is not). And her soul magnifies the Lord. This is interesting. How can her soul magnify the Lord?

"For He has looked with favor on his lowly servant"-- that is to say, God the Father has given her, his lowly servant, the Holy Spirit and has impregnated her with his very self: Jesus. Her soul magnifies the Lord as she carries Him in her womb. Her very person shows, up-close and personal, that God is creative and powerful and tremendously loving. As she carries Him in her womb, the world sees-- although the world can see Him not-- that God is personal. He is real. He is alive. And He is here.

We turn then, to contemplate Christ by looking at this woman, Mary, pregnant with our Savior.



As we look at this image of Mary, seen below as it is in the cathedral where it currently stands, we see that she is clothed in a robe of stars and standing on the moon-- she appears as the woman in Revelation, chapter 12. Her hands are folded in prayer, around her waist is tied a black band, and her clothing is decorated in many images and flowers. The center of the image is not her face or her hands or the moon, but her womb. As she is dressed, in what at the time would be considered the dress of a pregnant woman, the focus of the image is the child with whom she is pregnant; namely, Christ.

This is where our focus of the image is. She is presenting Jesus to us.

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is Christocentric-- that is, Christ-centered. These were the words of Father Eduardo Chavez, a very holy priest from Mexico who, in his vocation, was the postulator of the cause of the canonization of Juan Diego. Basically, what that means is that he did a lot of research into the above image, how it got where it is, who was involved, and whether or not the person involved-- that is, Juan Diego-- was a truthful, holy, and (this may sound funny) real man. Father Chavez also investigated the miracles surrounding Juan Diego.

There is a tremendous amount of information to say about this image, its history, its place in current-day Mexico, and all of the meanings which are found in the image's strokes and symbols. Father Chavez gave a three-and-a-half hour presentation on Our Lady of Guadalupe and, at the end of it, we all could have sat and listened to another three hours.

If ever you get a chance to hear this priest speak-- or if you have an opportunity to bring him to your parish-- DO SO.



Here, there is so much to relay to your from his presentation. First, I must say that if you have access to Father's book, I highly recommend you pick it up. Second, if you know of any place that has his other book, please let me know-- I want a copy! Third, what I didn't know about the image and what I now know has transformed my entire (but limited) notion of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Her story is amazing.

In order to understand better, but knowing that this blog is already too long, let me just give you some highlights.

° Before the appearance of Mary to Juan Diego in 1531, the Catholic Church in Mexico City and the surrounding areas was floundering. In fact, the bishop wanted to pull all of the priests out of the area because things were so bad.

° Before the appearance of Mary, the indian tribes of the area (who had been conquered by the Spanish) were extraordinarily depressed: 1/2 of them died with the smallpox epidemic; many died in the conquests of 1521; and they had all realized, when they stopped doing human sacrifices (which they believed kept the sun rising each day), that they didn't have to do human sacrifices anymore-- yet that was what they were raised to believe all their life. Their entire lifestyle was thrown upside-down.

° Over in Europe, in 1517, Martin Luther had posted his 95 Theses. And by 1530, the Protestant Revolution was in full swing.

° Back in Mexico, a poor indian farmer and widower, Juan Diego (who didn't speak Spanish) was walking through Tepeyac on the way to his parish in Mexico City. Mary appeared to him.

(For those who love Theology of the Body, there is a huge link between Adam in Genesis, Juan, and "Redeemed Man"-- that is, Juan is an archetype of all men. He isn't the New Adam, for that is Jesus; but Juan does represent humanity. Click on the link and read it in light of Genesis and TOB. Quite astounding stuff there)

° Mary asks a lot of things of Juan Diego (I'll leave you to read about them in the link above); one of which is for a temple to be built. In indian culture, the temple is the heart of a civilization-- in warfare, if you take the opponent's temple, you take the entire civilization; if you build a temple, you build a civilization. Mary wanted a temple; and she wanted a new civilization: a civilization of believers. (Here is where Our Lady of Guadalupe is often called the "Star of the New Evangelization")

° Juan Diego carried flowers in his tilma (the cloth on which the image was miraculously imprinted when Mary appeared to him). Flowers are a perfect sign for the Mexican indians-- a perfect sign of Truth. And a tilma is a sign of life (for in it the indians would carry food), of protection (eg, against cold or sun), of marriage (for it was integral to the wedding ceremony), and of dignity (one could tell the status of an indian by how it was or was not decorated). As Mary had her image upon Juan's tilma, we are to see her wanting to transform life and marriage and dignity and provide protection.

° The tilma which Juan Diego wore was rough and colorless. He was poor. After the apparation, his tilma was filled with color and flowers. In her so doing, Juan would be considered of high dignity.

° In the image, Mary takes the color of the Mestizo-- a spanish term for those people who were both indian and spanish. But, at the time-- and this is most important-- those who were the Metito were mixed-raced in a racially divided culture. Even more, this mixed-race had only existed for a couple decades; they were, for the most part, the products of war and rape. As a result, they were the most rejected members of the society: the indians rejected them becuase they were the products of rape; the Spanish rejected them becuase they were the products of war. They were the lowest of the low. And this is the color that Mary took.



° In the image, Mary's hands are folded in prayer-- in the way Spanish Catholics would pray and in the way that indian women would pray in their prayer dances.

° In addition, Mary took the name "Guadalupe." In the 700s, the Arabic people started to invade Spain. One of the results of this is that there are many Arabic words mixed in the Spanish language (most of the jeh and gah sounds, for example). "Guadalupe" is one such word of Arabic origin. It means "the river bed"-- it is not the river itself, but the channel in which the river flows.

° Aged indians were considered to be the roots of the culture, of wisdom, and of life. They were highly respected and revered. Juan Diego's uncle-- the old man of Juan's family-- was dying at the time of the apparations. After one of the appearances, Mary appeared to Juan's uncle-- and healed him. This was miraculous in a personal way; but also in the symbolism of the healing: Mary came not only to heal this one person, but to heal everything that he represented. She wanted to heal the culture, the wisdom, and the life of the people.

° A mere five years after the apparitions, 5,000,000 people in Mexico City and the surrounding area were baptized. The 30 priests who lived in the area of the time (yup, just 30), did upwards of 1,000 a day. The priests would go to bed with their arms sore from having baptized so many people.

° In 1539, the bishop of Mexico City wrote "from here, the worldwide evangelization has begun."

° If we take all that has been said above-- how Our Lady of Guadalupe takes the image of the poorest of the poor, how she heals the culture, how she arrives at a time of desperation both in Mexico and in Europe, and how she is a mix of indian, hispanic, arabic, and the lowly-- it is easy to conclude that she appears not simply for the Mexican people (or even for American people), but for all people.

° Mary appears to Juan Diego during the indian celebration of the winter solstace which was the moment when the sun began breaking through the darkness.



Those are the highlights. There is a lot more to say-- about the image, about Juan Diego, and about all the miracles that have happened since. Here, though, I end this lengthy blog with a simple thought and a last picture with the most comforting words of Mary to Juan and, really, to the whole world: how similar are the worlds of 16th Century Mexico and our current day! How impossible it seems to evangelize the world and inculturate the faith! But, this is what we must do. This is our mission.

And Our Lady of Guadalupe, who vists us as she visited Elizabeth, bringing us the child Jesus-- still in the womb-- comes to our aid as she did at the wedding feast at Cana. Let us not be afraid to "Behold, [our] mother"-- let us not be afraid to be with her at the foot of the Cross-- let us not be afraid to "do whatever [Jesus] tells us."

Even when we don't think it is our time.