Living here in modern America, perhaps it is difficult to manage the circumstances
facing those living in Mexico almost 500 years ago. In
1519, Hernan Cortes & the Spanish conquistadors had invaded the Aztec
empire in present-day Mexico, declaring their victory over the native
population in 1521. We
can only imagine how devastated the natives were at that time. Just
10 years later, in 1531, a 57 year-old native Mexican man named Juan Diego was
making the 15-mile trek to attend mass. A
woman's voice called out to him in the midst of beautiful music from atop
Tepeyac Hill; thus started the chain of events that led to the apparitions of
Our Lady of Guadalupe. Juan
Diego told the Virgin Mary in his humility: “I am a nobody. I am a small rope, a tiny ladder, the tail
end, a leaf.” Yet
God chose Juan Diego for a special task. Thanks
to him, Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of only a handful of confirmed apparitions
of the Virgin Mary validated by the Catholic Church.
Even
today, Our Lady of Guadalupe is the image of hope and liberation in the Mexican
and Latin American psyche. Go
through a poor Mexican American neighborhood in Los Angeles & you will see
the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe everywhere. The
image that Juan Diego brought into the world has so much meaning on so many
levels even for us today.
Today,
as we celebrate the memorial of St Juan Diego, let us look to Juan Diego and
Our Lady of Guadalupe as examples of faith, speaking out to us from a time and
place so different from modern America, but the message they bring to us still
resonates so clearly today.
"Life may seem overwhelming sometimes, but then Jesus tells us that he will help us carrying our load, that he will be there to get us through."
ReplyDeleteI needed to hear this again today, thank you so much for posting your homilies!