After many yearning years of hoping to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, this past All Saints Day (November 1^st) I was graciously afforded the opportunity.  As I approached the new basilica, designed by the architect, Pero Ramirez Vazquez, I was struck by how the structure created both a hospitable and protecting spirit, as if the church itself attracted you into the embrace of its great mother.  The beautiful draped style of the building’s roof representing the Virgin of Guadalupe’s ‘mantle’ both welcomes and covers all those who come to visit her.  This palpable sense of universal openhearted embrace is likewise captured in the circular floor plan inside the church, which allows one the ability to view the image of the Virgin from any point in the building.  With the doors open, from outside the church in the massive courtyard arena, one feels the intensity of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s deep desire that all converge toward her, from all places and spaces, far and near.

The theologian, Virgil Elizondo, in Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation, discusses through the profound Nahuatl/Aztec poem, the Nican Mopohua, which beautifully puts into writing the appearance of Our Lady in 1531 to Juan Diego on the hill called Tepeyac (in present-day Mexico City), how we are invited with all of our senses to witness the creative synthesis symbolized in this event, which paradoxically rises out of the destruction and discredit of world meaning for the indigenous people as the result of white European conquest.[i]  As we celebrate her feast day today, she starkly reminds us of a newness that can be born within us that will address the violence, oppression, and injustice that continue to assault us from all corners of our world, not from simply perfunctory reactions, but rather from a deep and wide realm of wholeness. The wealth of meaning in Our Lady of Guadalupe reminds us in an electrifying way that we are called to journey deep into the darkness that confronts our world and be in the darkness of the womb as inclusive light beckoning and ‘birthing’ transformation and healing.[ii]

The Nican Mopohua tells us that, prior to his first encounter with The Virgin of Guadalupe, Juan Diego hears birds “singing on the summit of the hill: as if different precious birds were singing and their songs would alternate, as if the hills were answering.” Elizondo points out that in the Nahuatl world, human discourse was never enough to communicate divine revelation.  Thus, flor y canto (flower and song) was the appropriate expression of the creative truth of the divine.[iii] Unknown newness is heralded by precious birdsong, which is simultaneously resonant and startling.

We also learn that during the sacred encounter, the Mother of Guadalupe charges Juan Diego with the task to approach the bishop and request that a “hermitage be erected in this place” wherein “I will show and give to all people all my love, my compassion, my help and my protection.”  After several visits to the bishop, who is reluctant to respond in accordance with the request, Our Lady of Guadalupe instructs Juan Diego to go up to the top of the hill at Tepeyac and gather flowers.  Upon doing so, he finds and collects “all kinds of exquisite flowers …open and flowering.  It was not a place for flowers, and likewise it was the time when the ice hardens upon the earth.” Flowers were growing in an unlikely place at an unlikely time.   Here unknown newness is heralded by unlikely and precious flowers – exquisite flowers that would not normally grow there and also were out of season (winter).   These aspects of the flowers in the story complement the precious birdsong at the beginning and together (flor y canto) they symbolize the completeness of the radical newness that is being born, or being created, in this divine encounter.[iv]

It occurs to me that Our Lady of Guadalupe has much to tell us about the meaning of the Incarnation and the type of radical newness that it portends.  As Luke recounts in today’s Gospel (Lk 1:26-38), the Annunciation story wherein the angel Gabriel informs Mary of that wonder which shall issue forth from her, the Feast of our Lady of Guadalupe underlines the surprising accountability that we have as full participants in the Transformative Newness, the ‘Child’ to be born into the world.  As much as the young virgin Mary in the Lucan account is perplexed, confused and uncertain, she is also accepting of that which is being asked of her.  Like Juan Diego, she accepts the flor y canto – the revelation of the Divine – she hears the song and collects the flowers, and does so with intentional trust.  The trust came from somewhere, perhaps that mysterious power of the Most High that ‘overshadowed her.”   But in the end, she engages and chooses to be ‘mother’ to the Child of humanity and Divinity!

In a way, Our Lady of Guadalupe is telling us how we can all be ‘mothers.’ Two centuries before the Guadalupe event, the 13^th century mystic, Meister Eckhart dared to say something similar when he claimed we are all ‘mothers of God’ since God is always in need of being born.  What does this mean?  How can this be? Mary’s questions resound in all of us.  I suggest that one meaning could be that our full participation in confronting the darkness of our world (both the unknown and the suffering) and bringing into the light the hope and justice of our true connectedness with each other and our God is more than a meager option.  Our Lady of Guadalupe is a symbol beyond gender, race, class, etc. – an image of whole nourishment, ecstatic care and healing that is the cornerstone piece of Jesus’ mission and the Christ journey.

When we look at Mary, we can perhaps begin to see how our own lives, indeed our very selves – many times experienced as uncertain, confused, painful, and even frightening –are wombs that have the possibility of giving birth, i.e., incarnating the divine, when we can accept the responsibility that we have for and in each other, and nourish and care for one another as ‘mothers.’ We are all potentially birthplaces of the Divine, Advents of God, and Igniters of the Love Fire.   We, like Our Lady of Guadalupe, are ‘hermitages” of Divine/Human Compassionate Inclusivity, when we intentionally live within one another. Is not this another way of looking at Incarnation as Communion?

Elizondo in Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation also describes how destruction and darkness in our world results from the failure to recognize our own inner and outer dignity, beauty, and infinite worth.[v]  He speaks of the ‘way of Incarnation’ as an approach to Life that starts from inclusivity and reverence rather than domineering darkness.  Surprise of surprises, the binary stance of duality has the possibility of being swept up into the wholeness of life and love.  This is being incarnation through conscious communion.  Life and personhood (not individualism) becomes an intentional honoring of a brilliance in enfleshment and embodiment that really is Divine.   This is a mode of living as Gift-ing or birthing wherein the ‘letting go’ (pain, difficulty, misunderstanding, hatred, joy, pleasure, etc.) transforms into ‘letting be’ (hope, joy, compassion, solidarity, uniqueness, integrity, etc.) which far from being a passive stance, requires the utmost zest and intent.

We by nature as persons are endowed to ‘mother’ and ‘be mothered,’ to nourish and be nourished, to care and be cared for, heal and be healed.   These attributes of nourishment and wholeness we have historically assigned to a traditional understanding of feminine.  But this sense of what we call “mothering’ is not the doting image of motherhood, but instead a convicted strength that en-genders whole-making communion consciousness through mutual affirmation.[vi]  So that being a ‘mother’ is not so much a traditionally understood objective gender role as much as it is a divine/human event of subjective coincidence and creative incarnation.

As Elizondo characterizes Our Lady of Guadalupe, this ‘mothering’ can be expressed as the embracing of diverse cultures amidst oppression and injustice wherein we can create and become the unknown – and unexpected at times – Truth (Cantos Y Flores) as Real Light of Life.  This is the embodiment of Truth as free radiant Whole-making, i.e., converging, coming together, including, as a dynamic process of creating more.  This could mean that Incarnation, embodiment, and creation (and perhaps even redemption) are all about whole-making.[vii]

Yet the way is dark much of the time – but darkness and hope are not mutually exclusive, whether you are talking about the darkness of suffering and injustice or the darkness of the unknowability of the future.  The Advent Light travels in and through darkness, and perhaps that is the primary way we will encounter its creative rays – through the birth canal of the unknown future.  Yet, there is somehow that wondrous trust and hope that we are being drawn together by the very same energy that radiates out from us.  How scandalous would it be if our God were a ‘Mother’ in the dark lighting the way for all Her children?  Or better yet, are we Godmothers, the very sparks that light the pathway of Her Divines footsteps, spontaneously combusting in every advance?  Dare we follow her as yet another Incarnation of the Christ in the universe?

“Silence, all, in the presence of the LORD! For she stirs forth from her holy dwelling.”(Zec 2:14-17)

[i] Virgil Elizondo, Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation (New York: Orbis Books, 1997).  Theologian Virgil Elizondo argues here that “the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the indigenous account of the real new beginnings of the Americas (Introduction, xviii-xix), which synthesizes and gives birth to a newness that neither the Nahuatl nor the Iberian (European) worldviews could have brought about each alone.

[ii] Elizondo, 38-48.  Elizondo here discusses how the physical location of Mt Tepeyac as the appearance of the Virgin to Juan Diego contrasts both the native feminine aspect of the Divine and the European masculine aspect of God, and between being at home yet a foreigner in one’s own land.  Tepeyac as this physical site of contrasts served as a womb for the Guadalupe event.

[iii] Elizondo, 34-35.  Elizondo notes here that Nahuatl theologians have claimed “no one on earth can tell the truth except through flower and song.”

[iv] Elizondo, 75-77.  “This is the ultimate truth of flor y canto…the truth that is experienced through all the senses, through every fiber of one’s being and in the deepest recesses of one’s soul.”

[v] Elizondo, 86.

[vi] Beatrice Bruteau, “Neo-Feminism and the Next Revolution in Consciousness” in The Grand Option (Notre Dame Press), 28-29.  Bruteau speaks of participatory or communion consciousness as an awareness of one large life circulating through persons that are whole, concrete and mutually affirming such that there is a free outflow of creative love that intends  life to be more abundant by giving one’s self for the other.

[vii] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Suggestions for a New Theology” in Christianity and Evolution (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 182-183.  Teilhard suggests that creation, incarnation, and redemption, when transposed from the old static cosmic environment into his evolutionary Christogenic cosmic model, can be viewed not as three separate mysteries but actually “as three aspects of one and the same fundamental process which he calls pleromization,” or the “mystery of the creative union of the world in God.”