Our Lady of Guadelupe (All the Marys, Part II)
Our Lady of Walsingham was the first Mary one encountered when entering the sanctuary, but she was not the only one and by no means the most prominent. Around 2010, Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, joined Mary of Walsingham.
For over a decade, the small congregation of Saints Peter and Paul included an even smaller community of Spanish-speaking Episcopalians—most former Roman Catholics—who, in pre-COVID times, held a Misa, or mass, every Sunday at noon.
For the Misa community, church was not church without at least one image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Like Mary of Walsingham, the Virgin of Guadalupe has the familiar look of Mary everywhere: calm and serene, motherly and divine. Stars sparkle from her blue-green cloak, and light emanates from her as though a golden spotlight sits on the ground behind her aimed at her back and shoulders, broader on Guadalupe than on many other manifestations of Mary. There are two Guadalupes at Saints Peter & Paul: a heavily shellacked painting next to the piano with its own prayer candle stand, and a beaded tapestry near the altar flanked year-round with tiny white Christmas lights which were as much of a fixture in the space as the tapestry itself. Those Christmas lights made me feel right at home at that church from the start.
The Virgin of Guadalupe was herself a bit of a troublemaker.
When I traveled to Mexico City in 2014, I learned the story of the beautiful brown woman who appeared to Juan Diego, an indigenous Mexican peasant, in 1531. She appeared several times over several days, each time with a message: Please tell the archbishop about me and ask him to build a church in my honor. Juan Diego went to the archbishop after each appearance; each time the archbishop refused to believe him. Three or four miracles later, the archbishop finally believed Juan Diego and believed the Virgin. One can only imagine what the archbishop, who would have been Spanish, thought of this indigenous-looking brown Virgin telling him what to do.
Our Lady of Guadalupe was the ultimate syncretistic saint, speaking in the native language and appearing to many of the locals to be a somewhat Christian-looking version of the Aztec earth-mother goddess Tonantzin. Hers was the first indigenous expression of Christianity the diverse peoples of the region we know as Mexico would have seen. She represented the integration of the colonial Christianity of the Conquistadors, in residence in Mexico at that point for only twelve years, and the native religion of the Aztecs.
Mary’s appearance, on the little hill of Tepeyac five centuries ago, the story of her persuasion of the archbishop, and her enduring presence throughout their messy history is a ubiquitous reminder to her people: whatever they do to you, don’t ever forget that this is your country. You are more than simply people who have been conquered and oppressed. You are my people.
In the years before COVID-19, the Misa community had a huge celebration each year that began at midnight on December 11 and stretched into the early hours of December 12, celebrating las mañanitas. Named for a traditional birthday song sung in the first hours of a birthday, las mañanitas celebrates the Virgin of Guadalupe beginning before dawn. In 2020, a small handful of women who met regularly on Zoom or by phone explained to us that las mañanitas was very important to celebrate, no matter what.
My 2014 visit to Mexico had been in December and so I was acquainted with the celebrations that took place there in honor of their patron saint. I’d been on retreat with a group of people from Portland learning about liberation theology alongside Mexican history and culture. On December 11 we took a long bumpy drive in our crowded van from Cuernavaca to Mexico City, about fifty miles along a road full of thousands of pilgrims making their way to the basilica, a pilgrimage site for millions every year. They flocked to the city in packed pick-up trucks and in cars full of children, Guadalupe banners, and picnic baskets. Many traveled miles on foot, carrying paintings of the Virgin on their backs.
When we arrived in the city and settled into the large drafty convent where our group was staying, we walked, with hundreds of thousands of others, several long blocks to the basilica. The wide pedestrian streets along the way were filled with vendors selling souvenirs. I managed to find a fleece jacket, which was a good thing, as it was chilly after dark in Mexico City in December.
The square in front of the basilica was full of traditional Aztec dancers who gathered together from all regions of the country for this annual celebration. The rhythmic power of their drums and movement reminded me that Our Lady of Guadalupe was not and would never be a European import but sprang from the heart of Mexico, from the earth mother herself.
In December 2020 at Saints Peter and Paul, this celebration looked very different.
After much back-and-forth about how to offer the celebration in the sanctuary in a COVID-safe way, live-streamed on Zoom so that people could participate at home, we gathered on a Saturday morning. Everyone stood six feet apart and my son was responsible for shifting the camera back and forth from the large, beaded tapestry of Guadalupe to the musicians. The tapestry had been draped with crepe garlands and surrounded by buckets of red and white roses, some real, some silk.
After my words of welcome in halting Spanish, I sat with my laptop in a front pew out of the camera’s sight. I watched the faces of the women singing their traditional songs on Zoom, their voices slightly off key in addition to being out of sync with one another and with the piano a few yards away from where I sat. In my mind’s eye was another video pane of Aztec dancers with their drums and cowrie shells singing the same songs on the plaza of the basilica in Mexico City.
We were a long way from that celebration in every way, and yet borne out in our small, odd, COVID celebration of Las Mañanitas was everything the Virgin of Guadalupe stood for: the triumph of local, indigenous tradition and identity over some imported, colonial style of worship. In this triumph she stood for liberation through holding on to identity. The Virgin of Guadalupe essentially said to the indigenous people of Mexico: you are who you are, you are people of this land, and I am with you. I am one of you. She was radical, no-strings-attached hospitality for a whole nation. No wonder our parishioners of Mexican descent loved her so much. She was not trying to make them Spanish or even to make them Catholic. She was not trying to change them.