In Advent our attention naturally turns to the Mother of our Lord as our December liturgies are pregnant with anticipating the celebration of Christ’s Nativity. During this time, millions of Christians around the world—but especially in Latin America—celebrate with great enthusiasm an appearance in 1531 of the expectant Mary on the Hill of Tepeyac in what is today the northernmost borough of Mexico City.
When I was 13 years old, I had my first experience traveling solo as well as my first experience on an airplane. My parents said goodbye to me at the Syracuse Airport and several hours later, I landed in what I remember as a crowded and chaotic airport in Mexico City. I was there to spend three weeks with my aunt and uncle, who were then serving as evangelical missionaries in our neighbor country to the South. The date? December 12, the Feast of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.
During my stay, we had the opportunity to visit the great Basilica of Guadalupe. I had, at the time, no conception of Marian spirituality, Catholic or otherwise. I was an evangelical boy; only in the previous couple of months had our family joined the Episcopal Church in a moderately high-church parish. And this was the only remotely Catholic piety to which I’d ever been exposed.
As we approached the iconic modern basilica, I saw pilgrims—some on their knees, some muttering prayers under their breath as they walked—moving across the plaza to the place where the great miraculous image of Guadalupe could be venerated. Venders sold rosaries and holy medals; children and disabled people begged alms; the smell of street food filled the air.
All of this goes back to the year 1531 when the Virgin Mary, according to faithful Roman Catholics, appeared to an indigenous peasant Christian named Juan Diego. He heard her speak his name and address him in his native Nahuatl language, not the Spanish of the conquistadors. She appeared with dark skin, as an expectant mother, in Native American clothing. And she asked him to build a church on the very site, a hill at Tepeyac.
The local bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, a Spaniard, at first did not believe him. But when the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego another time, she had him pick roses—an odd choice in the middle of December—which he held in his tilma, his cloak, and took to the bishop. When he opened the tilma and the roses fell to the bishop’s floor, to their surprise an image of the Virgin was miraculously impressed upon the cloth, with the moon at her feet, and in Aztec dress.
And so the first shrine was built at that spot, and pilgrims have flocked there ever since. I didn’t know what to make of all this—the shrine, the story, the piety. But my imagination was quietly captivated and has been ever since. I did not go home to the United States suddenly a Roman Catholic, or even an Anglo-Catholic. But the Virgen de Guadalupe seems to have followed me.
As a college student I found a small, amateurish hand-painted version of the image on the tilma at a flea market. It graced my dorm room thereafter and still hangs in my home. Later, when I joined the Byzantine Catholic Church, I was gratified to discover that she had been added to our calendar in America, having been named “Patroness of the Americas” in 1945 by Pius XII.
When I was ordained to the priesthood, I was honored to celebrate her feast each year. Later, when I returned to the Episcopal Church, I was delightedly surprised to find Our Lady of Guadalupe—while understandably not in Lesser Feasts and Fasts—has propers in the Book of Occasional Services.
The Virgen de Guadalupe is rarely seen among Anglicans, even Anglo-Catholics. We have our Marian shrine of preference in Walsingham. And yet I think there is something fundamentally evangelical that Guadalupe affirms. When Mary appeared to Juan Diego, the first thing she is said to have done was to identify herself as “the mother of the true God, for whom we live, the Creator of all things, Lord of heaven and earth.” She brought a high Christology to a native people, dressed in their culture, indeed in their flesh. As one might expect of one who sang the Magnificat, she appears to a peasant, a member of a downtrodden people.
Fr. Leander Harding, expounding the work of Lutheran theologian David Yeago, beautifully shows how the scriptural Mary points to the scriptural Christ. She is the “arch-believer” and the “arch-prophet” who is “an agent because she speaks to us her word, which is uniquely taken up into ‘this one word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.’”
And in the apparition at Guadalupe, we see Mary, too, as the “arch-missionary.” Though she has become a national symbol for Mexico—a particular culture—she is thereby shown to be a symbol for the universality of the Christian message and the Christian hope. If, during a period of Spanish Christian conquest of Native America, she appears as one of the colonized, we can see that the message can be inculturated in the whole world. Dorothy Day spoke of her as being “the mother of the poor.” There is simply no one the gospel cannot reach, to whom it ought not be preached.
As a young evangelical boy, while I would have been somewhat open to more charismatic “signs and wonders,” I had been taught to be somewhat skeptical of anything supernatural that appeared too Catholic. Certainly I was not an immediate devotee of the Guadalupe. But the more I’ve ruminated on Mary—and on the pilgrimage I didn’t know I was making back then—I see that the posture and attitude of the Mother of God is one of mission. She is the one who enjoins us to remember the great things God has done, the “good news to the poor” that Jesus preached in the Synagogue (Luke 4:18-19). Mary is the one who instructs us to “do whatever [Jesus] tells you” (John 2:5). She points us to her son. And this good news, this pointing to Christ, is for all people—of “every tribe, language, people, and nation” (Rev. 5:9).
The Rev. Geoffrey Mackey is rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Parkersburg, West Virginia. He spent over 20 years in Christian college and seminary contexts in administration, teaching, and student pastoral care. He studied at evangelical, Catholic, and Anglican seminaries and previously served as a parish priest in the Catholic Church’s Byzantine Rite.
