Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe



Mary, ‘the Virgin,’ has been held up as an example for all women to follow - chaste, meek, and gentle. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that Mary remained a virgin for her whole life, and uses her as an example of fidelity, purity and motherhood. However, I have a big problem with this traditional depiction of Mary! Aside from the Magnificat, Mary doesn’t say very much in the rest of the Gospels. She is a background character at best. She is also passive – God chooses her to bear Jesus, Joseph takes her out of Israel when Herod is massacring the children, she witnesses her son’s crucifixion.

Unfortunately for us Christians, Mary is the closest thing to the divine feminine that we have. She has therefore had to carry a lot of spiritual and psychic weight. We humans seem to have some need to see God as being like us. As Rousseau famously quipped, “God created man in his own image, and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.” More serious, though, is the power of our images of God: if we limit our depictions of Mary, then we risk limiting the roles that are permissible for women.

In the long history of Marian apparitions, from Međugorje to Conyers, Georgia, ‘the Virgin’ has mostly conformed to the gender roles that the Church has traditionally supported. However, in one image at least, Mary has taken a more active role.

This particular story begins with Hernando Cortez in 1519, when he started the conquest of Mexico. The conquistadors would read defiant Indians the requerimiento, a proclamation that asserted that Jesus Christ and his papal successors had authority over the Earth, that the Spanish monarchs had received title to the Americas, and that the Nahuatl were to submit to their rule. It was read to them in Spanish, which they did not speak. Bernal Diaz, who fought alongside Cortez, summarized his motives as “to serve God and His Majesty, to give light to those who were in darkness, and to grow rich, as all men desire to do.”

Spanish soldiers were granted land, under a system called encomienda, where conquistadors were granted “trusteeship” over the inhabitants of land. They were authorized to collect tax, and required to maintain order and provide Catholic teaching. The system rapidly degenerated into slavery and cultural destruction. The Spanish clergy failed to speak out. They were too busy debating whether the Indians had souls.

On December 9, 1531, some ten years after the conquest of Mexico, Mary appeared on a hill to an Aztec craftsman named Juan Diego Cuauhtlacuatzin. His last name means, “Eagle that talks.” Mary appeared as an Aztec, not a Spaniard. She addressed Juan Diego not in Spanish, but in Nahuatl, the Aztec language. She spoke to him not as a slave, but as one would speak to a prince. She commanded him to build a shrine to her on that spot, among the conquered. She sent him back to the Spanish clergy, they who thought they knew everything about God, who thought they had been sent to save the heathen.

The bishop rebuffed Juan Diego, and demanded a sign. Discouraged, and afraid to go back to the bishop, Juan Diego sought to avoid further visions of Mary. Some time later, while rushing to a nearby town to get a priest to confess his uncle, who was gravely ill, he passed the hill where he had met Mary. He tried to go around the other side, in order to avoid her, but she came to him and stopped him. She assured him that his uncle would be healed. She asked him to go to the top of the hill to pick some flowers to take back to the bishop. To his astonishment, Juan Diego found Castillian roses, which were rare in Mexico and nonexistent during the winter. He gathered some back in his tilma, or cape, to present to the bishop. When he found the bishop and gave him the roses, there was an imprint of the image of Mary on Juan Diego’s tilma. The garment has been preserved until this day.

The image as preserved on Juan Diego’s tilma is resonant with meaning to the indigenous people of Mexico. The turquoise of her mantle, for example, is the color reserved for the divine couple Ometecuhti and Onecihuatl, considered to be the creator and unifying force of all creation; and the angel who carries the Virgin denotes her as nobility. To Europeans, her posture and clasped hands seem to indicate that she is sumbissively bowing in prayer, but indigenous Mexican people would have seen her as making an offering. And uniquely among Marian apparitions, Our Lady of Guadalupe is pregnant. She wears a cinta, or maternity band, around her waist. There is a small flower, nagvioli, just above her womb, which the Nahuatl would have read as a sign of pregnancy.

The Christian tradition has associated the pregnant apparition with the Woman of the Apocalypse described in Revelation (Rev 12:1-10, NIV) “…a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth … she gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule the nations…”

The Divine Mother-to-be, as an image of God, is disturbing to many. Our new Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, declared in her investiture sermon that “our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation.” She was of course quoting the famous Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich; but some accused her of deliberately trying to provoke conservatives in the church. The Diocese of Michigan recently paid for a series of billboard advertisements, one of which said “God is my Mother.” Several churches denounced the advertisement. One suspects that some men fear that if they acknowledge a feminine side to God, they will lose their status and their power. Similarly, the Spanish clergy feared the effect of a Marian apparition among the indigenous people. To their credit, they relented.

David Abalos says that, in order to be whole, we all have to claim and re-claim four aspects, or “faces,” of our cultural being. They are the personal face, the political face, the historical face, and the spiritual face. The Spaniards saw God with a Spanish face, and they preached that God to the Nahuatl. But in doing so, they defaced the Nahuatl, personally, politically, historically, and spiritually, and made them less than whole. If you have a God forced upon you, who doesn’t look or talk or think like you, who indeed bears the face of your oppressor, how can you worship such a God?

Jeanette Rodriguez, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Seattle University, says that “God is always pregnant.” Think again about the time and the context in which Our Lady of Guadalupe appeard to the Mexicans. The world was falling apart. The Aztecs were facing invasion, genocide, and slavery. And still, God is always pregnant! God’s revelation to the Israelites did not stop when She led them out of bondage in Egypt. God sent Mary, in the guise of an Aztec, to liberate and reclaim the spiritual face of the Mexicans. God sees the disenfranchised and, in Rodriguez’s words, is “always there to transform, to transmute an experience of pain into an abundance of life … Empowered with their own dignity and humanity, they can then move to transform the world…”

In her great song of liberation, the Magnificat, (Luke 1:46-55), Mary says that God exalts the humble and meek, and scatters those who are proud in the imagination of their hearts. But God does not exalt the meek at anyone else’s expense. If we put aside our pride, we can be enriched as they are exalted. Jesus, after all, came among the Jews, but not at the expense of the Gentiles. In the same way, those of us who are not Mexican are enriched as this Mexican image of Mary speaks to us, thanks be to God!

(There is one last thing. Professor Rodriguez did a study with several Mexican-American women, and found that indeed, Our Lady of Guadalupe was a source of strength in their lives. She also found, however, that they did not know the full story of the apparition. They had been taught only about an image, and flowers, and a miracle. Their priests had made Our Lady vague, undifferentiated, and no different from any of the other Marian apparitions, save that she was Mexican. You now may know more about the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe than many Mexican-Americans.

The Christian tradition is very deep and rich, and replete with images of many faces of God. Those images can be sources of liberation for us. But sometimes, our worship is an attempt ‘tame’ God, or to hide the divine from our sight. Sometimes, like the Mexican-American women in Professor Rodriguez’s study, we are not able to access the image of the divine. And sometimes, we just don’t look. When Jesus tells to love our neighbors and even our enemies, he’s telling us that we always have to look. And if we do, we might just see that God is pregnant once again.)

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I should add: Reid Hamilton, my priest at Canterbury House, helped with editing this piece.