I would like to give the Virgin Mary Guadalupe a new title: Mother of God ~ All Courteous. Juan Diego was an Aztec native — of a people defeated by the Spanish Empire. A crushed man. A no-body. When on his way to Saturday morning Mass the lady appeared to him and said, "Listen my most abandoned son, dignified Juanito. Where are you going?" Notice the lady addressed him by his diminutive name — endearing, intimate, dignified.
When speaking of his encounters with the apparition he said, "I heard her thought and word, which were exceedingly re-creative, very ennobling, alluring, producing love." Years ago, a Benedictine nun said to me, "We are returning to the level of beasts in this country." Attentive to the news these days, I would say, I fear we are devolving.
The Guadalupe in her courtesy echoes Christ who celebrates faith outside of Judaism, who shares meals with people, who heals the ones thought of as "other," who celebrates as heroic the actions of people called "other," who invites in and blesses the littlest, who never insults...
The idolatrous gun-lust and daily death, this politicization of masks and vaccines while children are dying in the nation called "Pro-life" — the politicization of seemingly everything really — the faces of so many people made ugly by emotion more powerful than intelligence — forgetting how to nourish each other with compassion, respect and kindness — I think I have found my new invocation before the image of the Guadalupe (whose left leg is bent, as if advancing towards us in our trouble) — Mother of God, All-Courteous, Restore Us.
