Here’s the text I wrote on which I based my talk about Our Lady of Guadalupe for Spirit and Truth, the Monday night Holy Hour organized by the Catholic Student Organization at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Auburn, Alabama:
I’m going to talk to you guys about the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe. But, I don’t want to talk about her in the “traditional” way of telling the story about the apparitions nor do I want to go through all these historical facts and important dates or names that we can’t even pronounce. What I’d like to do is to focus on the message that she brought, on what it meant to the people of that time and I’d like to see if she has anything to say to us today.
In order to fully understand the meaning of Our Lady’s message, we have to place ourselves in the context in which they took place. For that, we’re going to have to go some five hundred years into the past and a couple hundred miles south, to what today is Mexico. What was going on at that time? Well, Mexico was pretty much a huge mess. The Spaniards had just recently defeated the Aztecs so we had this bunch of people who had nothing to do the one with the other, trying to live in the same place. And trying to bring some order into this chaos, we had the missionaries who were trying to convert the natives to Christianity. That means that we are trying to understand not one, but two peoples, each of which were going through different situations.
Now, I want you guys to help me out by using your imagination. And I want you to imagine what these missionaries were feeling. Imagine the passion they must have felt in order to give up everything they had to embark on a trip from which they would probably never return, far away from their home, their families, their culture… Imagine the enthusiasm they felt when they arrived in these new lands and saw all the souls that were there, just waiting to receive the Gospel. And not only were they enthusiastic, they were absolutely confident that they would succeed since they were doing what God wanted them to do. Now fast forward a couple of years, to 1530 and try to feel the deep disappointment that these missionaries were then feeling. They had done everything they could, they had done things that we would consider humanly impossible just to convert these people and they were failing. They were failing miserably. Imagine their frustration and sadness.
Now think about the natives. These people were going through a very painful situation. They literally saw their whole universe shatter before their very eyes. Their bravest warriors were defeated, their emperor was humiliated and their city destroyed. But, I think that the most important thing was that at the moment of their greatest suffering, they called out to their gods for help and they found out that they were yelling into nothingness. They discovered, by the hardest way possible that their gods did not exist. And yet, they couldn´t accept this new god because he had nothing to do with them, it was a foreign god. They were a deeply wounded people. Life had lost all meaning to them. Put yourself in their place and try to feel their anguish and despair.
This was the context in which the apparitions took place. It was a time when both conquered and conquerors could see no hope. It was truly the darkest hour of the night for these peoples and it was a night that seemed to have no end. It was precisely at that moment, that one cold December morning, a native convert, known by the Christian name of Juan Diego, came, before sunrise, knocking on the bishop’s door with a very important message, so important that he would speak of it only to the bishop himself.
What was this message that Juan Diego considered so important? The message was very simple: the Mother of God had appeared to him and wanted the bishop to build a temple where all those who suffered and were in need could go to her and where she could lead them to the One and True God. That God who knew that what all these people really needed was a mother. So He decided to give them His own mother!
Imagine what her words spoke to those people who were in such a desperate situation: “Am I not here, I who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Do you need something more? Let nothing else neither worry nor disturb you”.
These words meant so much to the people back then that the change in the social situation changed radically. Before her apparitions, only a handful of natives had converted to the Faith, despite the missionaries’ best efforts. After 1531, they started converting by the thousands. The chronicles of the time speak of the missionaries being overwhelmed by the rivers of people that wanted to be baptized. The old, the sick, the young, the poor, everybody would walk for miles just to receive Baptism. This happened not only because of her words but because the image itself spoke to these people in a language that we, as Westerners, don’t understand. The image spoke to them in their own language.
So, if Our Lady’s message had such an impact on people five hundred years ago, is it possible that it can still have such an impact on us today? Is she trying to say something to us, twenty-first century Catholics? Is she trying to say something to you, American Catholics? I would answer that yes, she is. Because today, as well as back then, we, as Catholics, are, or at least should be, burning in passion for souls. We want to go out and spread the Gospel and have people believe in Christ and come home to the Church. And yet, despite our best efforts, we are confronted with rejection and hostility. We do our best and yet, many times we fail.
Today, as in those times, those who don’t believe in God are a deeply wounded people. They have placed all their hopes and all their faith in many false “gods” –money, success, pleasure, drugs- and have found nothing but emptiness. They live in a world without any hope. It seems like there aren’t many differences between those times and ours.
In answer to Brea’s question from last week, as to why I think it’s so cool to be Catholic, I’d say that it’s freakin’ awesome to be Catholic because we have a mom. We have a mother to whom we can go to when we fail or when we feel frustrated and lonely. She will be there for us whether we’re saints or sinners, good Catholics or terrible Catholics, and who will always say to us: “Am I not here, I, who am your mother?”
To conclude, I’d like to say one last thing that is connected with what brings us here today. I believe that the whole apparitions would have been completely useless if they hadn’t led all these people to Christ. In the same manner, a talk about the Virgin Mary that doesn’t refer to her Son is a pointless talk. I’m convinced that the apparitions wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the deep Eucharistic devotion of many people: of Juan Diego, in the first place, who would walk more than ten miles every day to go to Mass, all this before sunrise; of the missionaries who surely spent many hours kneeling before the Most Holy Sacrament asking God for his help, just as we will be doing in a few minutes. So yes, we can always go to Our Lady for help, but in the end, she will always take us to her Son.
I’m going to talk to you guys about the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe. But, I don’t want to talk about her in the “traditional” way of telling the story about the apparitions nor do I want to go through all these historical facts and important dates or names that we can’t even pronounce. What I’d like to do is to focus on the message that she brought, on what it meant to the people of that time and I’d like to see if she has anything to say to us today.
In order to fully understand the meaning of Our Lady’s message, we have to place ourselves in the context in which they took place. For that, we’re going to have to go some five hundred years into the past and a couple hundred miles south, to what today is Mexico. What was going on at that time? Well, Mexico was pretty much a huge mess. The Spaniards had just recently defeated the Aztecs so we had this bunch of people who had nothing to do the one with the other, trying to live in the same place. And trying to bring some order into this chaos, we had the missionaries who were trying to convert the natives to Christianity. That means that we are trying to understand not one, but two peoples, each of which were going through different situations.
Now, I want you guys to help me out by using your imagination. And I want you to imagine what these missionaries were feeling. Imagine the passion they must have felt in order to give up everything they had to embark on a trip from which they would probably never return, far away from their home, their families, their culture… Imagine the enthusiasm they felt when they arrived in these new lands and saw all the souls that were there, just waiting to receive the Gospel. And not only were they enthusiastic, they were absolutely confident that they would succeed since they were doing what God wanted them to do. Now fast forward a couple of years, to 1530 and try to feel the deep disappointment that these missionaries were then feeling. They had done everything they could, they had done things that we would consider humanly impossible just to convert these people and they were failing. They were failing miserably. Imagine their frustration and sadness.
Now think about the natives. These people were going through a very painful situation. They literally saw their whole universe shatter before their very eyes. Their bravest warriors were defeated, their emperor was humiliated and their city destroyed. But, I think that the most important thing was that at the moment of their greatest suffering, they called out to their gods for help and they found out that they were yelling into nothingness. They discovered, by the hardest way possible that their gods did not exist. And yet, they couldn´t accept this new god because he had nothing to do with them, it was a foreign god. They were a deeply wounded people. Life had lost all meaning to them. Put yourself in their place and try to feel their anguish and despair.
This was the context in which the apparitions took place. It was a time when both conquered and conquerors could see no hope. It was truly the darkest hour of the night for these peoples and it was a night that seemed to have no end. It was precisely at that moment, that one cold December morning, a native convert, known by the Christian name of Juan Diego, came, before sunrise, knocking on the bishop’s door with a very important message, so important that he would speak of it only to the bishop himself.
What was this message that Juan Diego considered so important? The message was very simple: the Mother of God had appeared to him and wanted the bishop to build a temple where all those who suffered and were in need could go to her and where she could lead them to the One and True God. That God who knew that what all these people really needed was a mother. So He decided to give them His own mother!
Imagine what her words spoke to those people who were in such a desperate situation: “Am I not here, I who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Do you need something more? Let nothing else neither worry nor disturb you”.
These words meant so much to the people back then that the change in the social situation changed radically. Before her apparitions, only a handful of natives had converted to the Faith, despite the missionaries’ best efforts. After 1531, they started converting by the thousands. The chronicles of the time speak of the missionaries being overwhelmed by the rivers of people that wanted to be baptized. The old, the sick, the young, the poor, everybody would walk for miles just to receive Baptism. This happened not only because of her words but because the image itself spoke to these people in a language that we, as Westerners, don’t understand. The image spoke to them in their own language.
So, if Our Lady’s message had such an impact on people five hundred years ago, is it possible that it can still have such an impact on us today? Is she trying to say something to us, twenty-first century Catholics? Is she trying to say something to you, American Catholics? I would answer that yes, she is. Because today, as well as back then, we, as Catholics, are, or at least should be, burning in passion for souls. We want to go out and spread the Gospel and have people believe in Christ and come home to the Church. And yet, despite our best efforts, we are confronted with rejection and hostility. We do our best and yet, many times we fail.
Today, as in those times, those who don’t believe in God are a deeply wounded people. They have placed all their hopes and all their faith in many false “gods” –money, success, pleasure, drugs- and have found nothing but emptiness. They live in a world without any hope. It seems like there aren’t many differences between those times and ours.
In answer to Brea’s question from last week, as to why I think it’s so cool to be Catholic, I’d say that it’s freakin’ awesome to be Catholic because we have a mom. We have a mother to whom we can go to when we fail or when we feel frustrated and lonely. She will be there for us whether we’re saints or sinners, good Catholics or terrible Catholics, and who will always say to us: “Am I not here, I, who am your mother?”
To conclude, I’d like to say one last thing that is connected with what brings us here today. I believe that the whole apparitions would have been completely useless if they hadn’t led all these people to Christ. In the same manner, a talk about the Virgin Mary that doesn’t refer to her Son is a pointless talk. I’m convinced that the apparitions wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the deep Eucharistic devotion of many people: of Juan Diego, in the first place, who would walk more than ten miles every day to go to Mass, all this before sunrise; of the missionaries who surely spent many hours kneeling before the Most Holy Sacrament asking God for his help, just as we will be doing in a few minutes. So yes, we can always go to Our Lady for help, but in the end, she will always take us to her Son.
2 comentarios:
Thank you Alejandro! your talk was soo good!!
Thanks! I'm glad you liked it!
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