Feast Day

Today's the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, my personal favorite feast day. It's really a holy day on several levels. Her story is sweet and a bit twisted and involves no martyrdom (at least, not hers); it's also the story of a meeting of two great and very different cultures.

The Virgin of Guadalupe, now a Catholic saint, is the protector of the unborn. Hers is the only sighting of the Holy Mother in the 'new world,' too, so it's no wonder that she is also the patron saint of the Americas. Since her appearance in 1531, she's been a strong symbol of security and hope in Mexico and beyond.

Here at Lunaloca, you'll see lots of her around, keeping an eye on things:




The appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1531 to Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac in what is now present-day Mexico City is an event that bridged the religious worlds of the Spanish conquerors and the Aztecs. It's also a great story of how an unfairly suppressed culture was able to 'reinstate' their most important goddess and her temple in a way that was actually embraced by the Christian Spaniards. Those Aztecs were pretty clever.

Photographer and former monk Martin Grey wrote a fascinating account of her sighting that includes most all of the pertinent details (www.sacredsites.com):

"... the hill of Tepeyac was a place of great sanctity long before the arrival of Christianity in the New World. In pre-Hispanic times, Tepeyac had been crowned with a temple dedicated to an Earth and fertility goddess called Tonantzin, the Mother of the Gods. Tonantzin, like the Christian Guadalupe who usurped her shrine, was a virgin goddess, also associated with the moon.

"The Tepeyac hill and shrine had been an important pilgrimage place for the nearby Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan. Following the conquest of Tenochtitlan by Hernan Cortez in 1521, the shrine was demolished, and the native people were forbidden to make pilgrimages to the sacred hill. Such practices were considered by the Christians to be devil worship. This policy of labeling pagan religious practices as demonic already had a more than thousand-year history in Christian Europe.

"On Saturday, December 9, 1531, a baptized Aztec Indian named Juan Diego set out for church in a nearby town. Passing the pagan sacred hill of Tepeyac, he heard a voice calling to him. Climbing the hill, he saw on the summit a young woman who seemed to be no more than fourteen years old, standing in a golden mist. Revealing herself as the "ever-virgin Holy Mary, Mother of God" (so the Christian telling of the story goes), she told Juan Diego to go to the local bishop and tell him that she wished a church to be built on the hill. Juan did as he was instructed, but the bishop did not believe him. On his way home, Juan climbed the sacred hill and again saw the apparition, who told him to return to the bishop the next day. This time the bishop listened more attentively to Juan's message from Mary. He was still skeptical, however, and so asked for a sign from Mary.

"Two days later Juan went again to Tepeyac Hill and, meeting Mary, was told by her to climb the hill to the site of their first encounter, pick a bunch of roses that would be growing there, and return with the roses to Mary. Juan climbed the hill with misgivings. It was the dead of winter, and no roses could possibly be growing on the cold and frosty hill. But upon reaching the summit Juan found a profusion of roses, an armful of which he gathered and wrapped in his shawl to carry to Mary.

"Arranging the roses, Mary instructed Juan to take the shawl-encased bundle to the bishop, for this would be her sign. When the bishop unrolled the shawl, the presence of the roses was astounding. But truly miraculous was the image that had mysteriously appeared on the inside of Juan Diego's shawl. The image showed a young woman without child, her head lowered demurely. Wearing an open crown and flowing gown, she stood upon a half moon. Soon thereafter the bishop began construction of the church.

"News of the miraculous apparition of the Virgin's image on a peasant's shawl spread rapidly throughout Mexico. Indians by the thousands, learning that the mother of the Christian God had appeared to one of their own kind and spoken to him in his native language, came from hundreds of miles away to see the image, now hanging above the altar in the new church. The shrine, rebuilt several times over the centuries, is today a great basilica that has space for 10,000 pilgrims. Juan Diego's shawl is preserved behind bulletproof glass and hangs twenty-five feet above the main altar in the basilica. For more than 450 years the colors of the image have remained as bright as if they were painted yesterday, and the coarse-woven cactus cloth of the shawl, which seldom lasts more that twenty years, shows no evidence of decay."

The soft-spoken Virgin became a symbol of the fusion of the two cultures, Spanish and Aztec, into the country and culture of Mexico. She's sometimes called the black or dark madonna because she appeared as an Aztec and spoke in Nahuatl, their native language. Many Mexicans still refer to her as the "Little Mother."

So it's no coincidence that, in 1810, when Don Miguel Hidalgo called for an uprising which led to the independence of Mexico from Spain, he adopted her pennant as the first Mexican flag. While spending a month in Guanajuato this summer, my daily trek into town would take me by the corner where Father Hidalgo's head hung in a metal cage as a warning to all revolutionaries. The Spanish rule of Mexico was bloody and unjust and often unreasonably cruel. But I digress ... don't get me talking about Guanajuato and the Mexican revolution ...

More than 2 million people are expected to make the pilgimage to the Shrine of Guadalupe on Tepeyac Hill this year, but they are not the only pilgrims, just the luckiest. All over the world, people will be honoring her, and not just good Catholics. I read this morning that more than 20,000 people will attend services at Dallas' Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe where the cathedral is decorated with hundreds of roses.

And in other news, shame shame! Playboy magazine has issued an apology for its recent cover photograph of a nude Virgin of Guadalupe. The issue was released only in Mexico, where I'm sure it offended some of its regular readers. Click here for that story.

Here in Terlingua, prayers to her will be said and requests made as the full moon, the biggest and last one of this year, rises over the desert mountains on this crisp, chilly evening.