Fall is the busy time of year, when squirrels gather nuts and humans get back to serious business. For those in the retired set, it is often the time when we do our summer business because the weather is still fairly warm but the mosquitoes and the other tourists are largely gone. Such it is that I will be busy later in the month and so am posting this slightly ahead of schedule (normal: the middle of the month or first or last of month). And such it is that soon after, we will be going to where the leaves of the trees march to a different drummer: Mexico.
Oh, I have been there before. The first time was in 1980 when I went as a student abroad to Cuernavaca to finish my undergrad. A portion of my time there is portrayed in the essay “My Guitar” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars. It was a sad time when I lost a woman with whom I was infatuated. She turned out to be a psychological and moral wrecking ball and thank God she dumped me, but I was often extremely depressed there, and twice, extremely sick. From that time on, I have thought of Mexico as a very sad place, inviting in the same way as a misty day in November might be welcomed in a melancholy mood.
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The next time was a summer-long trip to the Sierra Madre of backwoods Jalisco in 1982, where a girlfriend and I hiked up into the mountains to live with the Huichol Indians. We were dirt poor during that time, had to deal with corrupt officials and, worse, had to thread our way through the incipient presence of the narco gangs. We came very close to some very serious business there, and I felt enormous relief when I took my first breath back in the good ol’ US of A. I thought then, and for good reason, that I would never go back to Mexico. That has been my conviction until the Virgin Mary recently decided differently.
The “Virgen de Guadalupe” is the first (Catholic) official site of a Marian apparition in the Americas, and it remains the most prominent (in the US, an official site exists only in Champion, Wisconsin). While it once lay well outside of Mexico City, it is now surrounded by that mega-beast where I once wandered the streets sick as a dog wondering how I might make my way to the airport. I had never thought much of the place because of the city, and I had never thought twice about going there. Old stuff, I thought. There is the famous tilma (cape made of maguey cactus that the Aztecs wore) with the image of the Virgen on it that is truly remarkable and a very real miracle, but otherwise, the site, besides its location, has always seemed too old and worn out to still have much power. Mary appeared to the Aztec convert Juan Diego in 1531, which spurred the conversion to Catholicism of nearly every Indian who had lived under the Aztec rule. Since then, the chapel that had been built at the site has become (to me) merely an historic relic.
That is, until I read the most marvelous book, Our Lady of Guadalupe, by Carl Anderson and Msgr. Eduardo Chavez. In this we learn not only of the life of Juan Diego himself and his historic confines, but also of the true miracle of the tilma. We find that everything about the image has meaning beyond normal understanding. For instance, the designs on the cloak of Our Lady are not mere arabesques as I have always thought, but instead speak in the language of the Aztec codices, a form of writing that elicits meaning through images. Spread out on the ground as the Aztec scholars would have it, it tells the people of that land that the distant supreme deity that they had once thought too great to be approached has come down to touch them in the person of Christ through Mary; it tells them that Mary and her child are for ALL people, and have come to replace human sacrifice with the sacrifice of God himself; and in that, it tells them that God not only cares, but loves them more deeply than they can imagine. In that last, it tells them that their fears about the end times – of their times - have come to pass but in a most marvelous way: that from now on, they will know that God has intervened so that they might spend eternity in glory.
There is so much more but we do not have the time. However, just the information above was enough to make me crave a visit to the chapel in person. Here was exhibited not only a genuine miracle in material manufacturing, but also a miracle of thought, thought that put into pictures the answers to the deepest fears and longings of the Aztecs. The message was so thorough and profound that it converted a nation then numbering nearly 10 million (a vast population for even the Europeans then) not through the sword as we have been taught, but through miraculous grace.
There is also the matter of her person itself: Mary is pictured as being brown in pigmentation with some Indian features. For years I have known that she came as a mestizo, someone of mixed European and Indian race, but I did not realize that back in 1531, there were almost no mestizos. The Spanish had been in Mexico for only 12 years at that point, and in charge only 10. They had had little time to spread their seed, as they so infamously did in the remaining centuries. Mary, then, was a vision of the future, a future that was not inevitable. Even with rape and willful interbreeding, the Indian majority would still have overwhelmed the Spanish minority by sheer numbers had it not been for the terrible plague that came and killed up to 95 percent of the Indians less than 15 years after the apparition. That evened the numbers, and the general Mexican race was born.
The fact of the Spanish presence and plagues brings up another remarkable aspect of the Guadalupe story. At the time of the apparition, Juan Diego was in his mid-fifties. He had been born and raised in a nearly invincible empire, one that belonged to the gods, and one that was threatened by no force but those gods. The Conquest caused everything to tumble down, biting into the heart of the Mexican people’s theocratic universe. Everything to them, from farming to warfare to government, had been powered by their gods. This ‘Everything’ fell apart when a small cadre of Conquistadores proved to be a force far stronger than their god-emperor and his tens of thousands of warriors. This force labeled their own venerated gods as minions of the evil one, Satan, who himself was inferior in every way to the European god. Adding onto this the slave-like conditions the defeated Aztecs were subjected to, and the Indians could be described as a people beaten and abused in every possible way.
Juan Diego himself was only a peasant within his own culture, putting him at the bottom of the social scale. He was exceedingly humble and well aware of his own insignificance. When he was unable to comply with a request from the apparition because of a dying uncle, he spoke to Mary thusly: “Because in reality for this we were born, we who came to await the task of our own death.” To which Mary replied, “Am I not here, I who have the honor to be your mother? Are you not in my shadow and under my 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 anything more?”
Within the context of events, within the context of the social and political upheaval of the times for Juan Diego, this might be one of the most beautiful encounters in history. Juan was humble unto death, little more than nothing among his people, even less before the conquering Spaniards, and a mere creature before the holy power of God. But God came to him at his level, saying in His own way through the mother of God, “I am here to love you, to protect you. You are not some distant nobody, but at the very center of my thoughts and cares. Your humbleness has opened your heart to me, and I my heart to you. Care not, for you are in my care.” In his humility, Juan Diego was the perfect man to deliver unto the arrogant Spaniards a message and a miracle straight from the Holy Mother, a message that should still resound throughout the world: “Come to me in your humbleness with purity of heart, and through the power of God’s love I will cradle you within the hollow of my mantle.”
As for the future, that the Holy Mother came as a mestizo represents more than Mexico’s future. It is the future of all the Americas. We in the US will be a race made from the entire world, not from just Indians and Whites. The Americas are becoming and will be a blend of everyone, and Mary has always been and will be for everyone. Mexico in its own way will become the center of the hemisphere, the land between the powers of the south and north, and the land where the dishonesty and greed of man will be presented most clearly. Its sadness was in the hearts of the Aztecs as they sacrificed their own children to their hungry gods; it was in the hearts of the conquered Indians such as Juan Diego; and it grows in the hearts of Mexicans today who can barely survive in a corrupt narco-state of unfathomable cruelty and avarice. Now, their problems are becoming all of our problems.
As in 1531, we still have the same solution to our problems, more necessary now than ever: to imitate the humility and take on the pure heart of Saint Juan Diego and let God, with the aid of his mother, lead us. “Am I not here, I who have the honor to be your mother?” Yes, she is. We have only to realize that all of us in the end are only simple, bewildered children in God’s world. It is then that we will receive the loving care of our adopted Mother; it is then that our longings will be filled to the brim with the radiance and joy of the Eternal.
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