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Having visited Mexico and the site of this apparition, I love and often pray with some of the words of La Virgen to Juan Diego, “Where are you going, the least/littlest of my children? Am I not here, I who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not your fountain of life? Am I not your health? Are you not in the folds of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else that you need?" Many see La Virgen de Guadalupe as a manifestation of the feminine face of our Mother God. Others revere her as Mary, Jesus’ mother and our mother, messenger of God’s great love for us. While we can argue in scholarly studies what Mary’s words imply about the suppression of simple, indigenous faith, I have come to believe that it’s more important to pay attention to how God calls to us. When we walk past tried and true sources of grace, when we forget our history with God and God’s history with us, when we strike out on our own, when we journey in the delusion that we are alone and not connected – she calls to us. “Am I not here? What need do you have of anything else?”
Recently, I’ve been praying with her designation of Juan Diego as the “least and littlest of my children.” In great mutuality, la Virgen de Guadalupe comes to us as a young, pregnant woman of color, one of the least. Remembering my visit to Chimaluacán , I pray for the grace of this other encounter with the Divine, who seeks the least and wishes to be found as one of them. As I try to bypass the stranger, the person at work I find hard to like, the needy one who calls or stands at my door, her call reminds me, “Where are you going? Am I not here?”
Finally, a charming story about faith! I spent some time in Mexico during the weeks approaching the canonization of Juan Diego in 2002 and a frequent theme in the press was the lack of real evidence that a person named Juan Diego ever even existed. How could the Church canonize a man that we were not sure had ever lived? The response of the people said it all: “Did Juan Diego really exist? Perhaps (probably) not! Did la Virgen appear to him? Absolutely!”
May our loving God continue to call to us, challenge us, embrace us and may we believe in what matters!
--Ceil Cavanaugh SSJ
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