IMAGE:Our Lady of Gudalupe
The Mother of Heaven was standing in the very same place where he had first seen her. He knelt before her and said:
“Lady, my Child, tiniest of my children, I went to fulfill thy command. I saw the prelate and related to him thy message. 
By his reply I realised he did not think it to be thy order. Send, Lady, a person of mark that he may believe it. My lady, I am a paltry fellow, a man of straw, a bumpkin, a commoner and Thou my child, my lady, didst send me to a place I go not, where I stay me not. Forgive me the great grief I cause thee, lady and mistress mine.”
“Listen, my son, least of my sons,” the Most Holy Virgin answered him, “Many are my servants whom I can charge with my message; yet I wish it to be thou to make my petition, to help by thy mediation my will to be accomplished. I charge thee, go again to the bishop, tell him again that the Holy Mary, Virgin Eternal, Mother of God, sends thee.”
from Nican Mopohua 1545 by by Don Antonio Valeriano
The small parish church I attend has a large number of Mexican members. For a few Sundays over the past month they have held a food sale featuring a wide variety of homemade Mexican dishes from tamales to tres leche. Everything is $1 and I never go away hungry. The sale raises money for the procession and celebration of the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The feast commemorates the apparitions of Mary to a poor Indian, Juan Diego, in 1531. She requested that a church be built at the top of the hill where they stood and instructed Juan Diego to carry her message to the bishop. He did, but the bishop did not believe him. Juan Diego returned to the hill and spoke with Mary, who sent him back to the bishop with her request.
On his fourth visit with Mary, she instructed him to gather roses growing on the snowy hill. She arranged them in his cloak and sent him back to the bishop with a sign he had requested. When Juan was admitted to see the bishop and opened his cloak to show him the flowers, the blooms tumbled onto the floor revealing an image on the inside of the cloak of Mary as Juan had seen her. The bishop fell to his knees and soon the church project was underway.
Over the years, the validity of this story has been questioned, as all miraculous events are. Scrutinized by unbelievers or others curious about such things, the cloak is preserved and displayed at the church on the hill of Tepeyacac near Mexico City. Juan Diego was canonized a saint in the Catholic Church in 2002.
Whether or not one believes that the image appeared miraculously on Diego’s tilma or not, the story has something to teach us.According to the account by Don Antonio Valeriano, after the bishop’s first refusal to believe his message, Juan Diego returned to Mary and told her that she had the wrong man. Send someone of higher social ranking, someone who would go to places like a bishop’s office. Diego was not comfortable in such surroundings, and the bishop did not give much credence to a poor Indian’s story. “Piety,” the bishop thought, and imagination.
One cannot fault the bishop for wanting more evidence than the story, but Juan Diego’s comments are telling, and not much has changed. Many of those in positions of authority do not give proper respect and consideration to the poor and/or uneducated who come before them. Instead the assume that the person is unreliable, or ignorant, or basically inferior. One wonders what the bishop’s reaction might have been had the messenger chosen by Mary been wearing a suit or a cardinal’s hat.
Once, a while working in a grant funded family literacy program that served poor young mothers, I overheard one of them recounting a recent meeting with her caseworker.
“Last time, she didn’t listen to me at all, so THIS time I took Jane with me. Everyone there knows Janet. She is smart and her husband is a lawyer. So, anyway, Janet and I walked in and everybody was nice and, you know, ‘Can I help you,’ and all that. I didn’t have to wait and when we went in my caseworker’s office, she was smiling and everything like that. And she listened to my problem and got it fixed up.”
My student smiled. “Next time, if you need something, take Janet!”
Juan Diego must have felt like that. Why would Mary entrust someone like him with such an important message? Why would she speak to him at all?
“Am I not your mother?” she had said. “Am I not here with you?”
Jesus sent the Spirit to dwell in every person. Each of us carries some part of the Divine into the world. Mary’s response to Juan Diego, whether spoken from her lips or invented as part of a story, reflect Jesus’ call to reverence the life in every person.
In a world where media hawks the “perfect look.” and success is measured by paychecks and possessions, respect for those who have none of the above can be difficult to find.
As we wait for the feast of Christmas, we do well to remember that the Creator of all that is chose to enter our world in poverty and in the form of an infant, the most vulnerable of us all.
© 2010 Mary van Balen
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