The Guadalupe Celebration
Homily Text by Fr Jeremy Driscoll
Given on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe December 12th, 2009
Fr Jeremy is a Monk of Mount Angel Abbey and a dear friend of our community.
Abbot Peter, my dear brothers of the monastic community, friends of the community, my dear Christians all— I wish you a happy feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, knowing she will bring special blessings to us all on this day. I thank you, Abbot Peter and the monastic community, for the privilege of being asked to preach on this day. It gives me the opportunity to express my special esteem and love of your community.
It was just a little over two years ago that Abbot Peter and I were able to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. What beautiful days of prayer we passed together there. Early one morning, together with three other monks from Mount Angel’s foundation in Mexico, we gathered outside in a relatively secluded area at the base of the hill of Tepeyac. There we took turns reading slowly from the account, translated by Fr. Martinus, of the appearance of the Virgin to Juan Diego. We felt in a special way the presence of Mary again in that place: a fresh, new, quietly arriving interior apparition. It is a sense of presence that returned to us again as we spent more time praying under the tilma that bears the glorious image. And it is a presence that returns to me here under the image in your own church.
Our Lady of Guadalupe is the patron of this church and monastery. This means that the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico is somehow mysteriously also the story of this monastic community. That is to say, the same pattern of marvelous signs characterizes the story of both. Today’s scriptures reveal that to us. I would like to offer you a meditation on those scriptures in the old monastic style, that style that listens slowly and carefully to one verse after the other and hears them speaking not only of God’s wondrous deeds in the past but also of what he is doing here and now. In today’s scriptures we hear recounted the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I mean in Mexico. I mean in this monastic community.
Let us move through those scriptures, quietly and slowly now. Doing so is part of the celebration of the feast. The prophet Zechariah says, “Sing and rejoice, O daughter Zion! See, I am coming to dwell among you, says the Lord.” Yes, the Lord comes to dwell among us in a precise form: in the appearance of the “lovely lady.” “Many nations shall join themselves to the Lord on that day,” the prophet continues. I’ll say! Not only the native peoples represented in Juan Diego, not only the newly arrived Spanish, but by now all the Americas— Central, South, and North— who call the Guadalupana Our Lady of the Americas. Then the prophet says, “and you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you.” But now this is Mary’s line. The Lord of hosts has sent Mary— Mary in this beautiful image— to us, to this monastic community. Zechariah next declares, “The Lord will possess Judah as his portion in the holy land, and he will again choose Jerusalem.” But we know, as a principle of Christian exegesis, that in the sacred scriptures the names “Judah and Jerusalem and Zion and Israel” all now refer, as the great Origen once bluntly stated, to the Church and to every Christian soul. And so “the Lord possesses Judah in the holy land” by possessing the hearts of the monks in this monastery. And “the holy land” is the very land on which your monastery is built and the slopping, forested hillside that rises behind it. “The Lord of hosts has sent Mary to you.” “He will again choose Jerusalem,” the prophet says. Here he speaks of today’s feast. The “again” is realized today in what we are celebrating. We all are this new Jerusalem. The passage of the prophet that we heard begins by urging us to “sing and rejoice,” and this we indeed are doing and have done. But he finishes with an injunction which is its opposite. He says, “Silence, all mankind, in the presence of the Lord!” And indeed, with such a command he renews and gives specific focus to the silence of this place and to the silence which Cistercian monks are famous for practicing. Silence— because we are in the presence of the Lord. We are in his presence under the image of the holy tilma. In a unique way, in today’s feast, the prophet’s words are fulfilled: “Silence… for the Lord stirs forth from his holy dwelling.” His body and blood are soon to be present on this altar.
Let us turn to the second reading from the Book of Revelation for a different angle of meditation on Our Lady of Guadalupe. I mean in Mexico. I mean in this monastic community. The passage opens with the phrase “the ark of the covenant could be seen in the temple.” We know that “ark of the covenant” is a title for Mary and very suitably so, for she is the shrine that contains within herself the Father’s eternal Son, who is himself the “new and everlasting covenant.” But the special word we celebrate today from this phrase is the word “seen.” The ark of the covenant is seen in the temple when we look at this God-given, divinely drawn image of Our Lady.
This image exactly corresponds to the description of the inspired scriptures. “A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” We are familiar with these words as a description of this image, but we would do well especially to notice that the woman is called “a sign,” indeed, “a great sign.” Of what is she the sign? She is a sign of the holy and immaculate Church. And she is a sign of this monastic community, of its calling, of its destiny.
The woman is said to be “with child,” and that is what we see subtly expressed in the image. And further, it says, “she wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth.” Now, there is a description of a monastery if there ever was one! And in the monks’ struggle, of course, we have an icon of the struggle of the whole Church. And so it is all of us who are described here. Monks come to the monastery to undergo the labor pains that will give birth to Christ in our world. A beautiful vocation. But even as we see this beautiful sign, another terrifying sign appears alongside it: “a huge red dragon… whose tail sweeps away a third of the stars in the sky… and who stands ready to devour the woman’s child when she gives birth.” It is not difficult to see in this a reference to our troubled times: a furious dragon in the world, in the Church, in this monastery, and in the heart of every one of us— a dragon who truly seems capable of destroying the entire blessed world that the Lord is giving us. But no! “The child is caught up to God and his throne.” “The woman herself fled into the desert where she had a place prepared by God.” That is to say, both the child and the woman are safe. And once again in the sacred text we have a detail which fits well the monastic scene. The woman, who is image of the monastic community, is said to be in “the desert.” And we know from the historical beginnings of monastic life in the deserts of Egypt that in some extended mystical sense, every monastery is in the desert, and every monk lives a desert. But this is also said to be “a place prepared for her by God.” Our Lady of Guadalupe: the name of this “desert” monastery.
Now we come to the gospel, the story of the Visitation! “Visitation” is exactly a word that describes Our Lady of Guadalupe. I mean in Mexico. I mean in this monastic community. We read, “Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste.” Yes, we know these words describe Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, but they also perfectly correspond to Mary’s setting out to meet Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac. And today they also correspond to Mary’s visit to this community established here on the slope of this hill in Oregon’s hilly wine country.
The word “greeting” occurs three times in the evangelist’s short account. We hear the phrase “Mary greeted Elizabeth,” and then immediately after that the phrase “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting,” and then shortly after that, Elizabeth saying the phrase to Mary “the sound of your greeting.” At Tepeyac Mary’s greeting was the image of herself left on the tilma. Today Mary’s greeting is the same. We celebrate her image in this church today as a greeting from her. Something stirs within us at her greeting. It is something that discerns the presence of Christ within her. We are pleased to borrow Elizabeth’s words to respond to the greeting. We say to her, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Elizabeth herself borrowed words for what she next says. She exclaims in wonder, “And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” She was thinking of David, who, when the ark was brought to Jerusalem, declared with godly fear, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?” (1 Sam 6: 9) Elizabeth recognizes her cousin as the ark of the new covenant. This well used line which passes from David to Elizabeth fits perfectly as well what we know of Juan Diego’s reactions. He too is wondering, “And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” But if that line works well for David, for Elizabeth, for Juan Diego, then it is meant to be the line that we speak as well in celebrating the feast today, in celebrating Our Lady of Guadalupe as the patron of this Abbey. “And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”
It is at this point that Mary bursts into song, into her Magnificat, which is sung every day in this church together with her. We should take note that it is Mary’s prayer, Mary’s joy, a prayer that arises within her precisely in the moment when we recognize Christ within her. We could even say that Elizabeth— and so we also in her same train— is a kind of “help” to Mary that urges her more deeply into her own understanding and contemplation of the infinite mystery she carries in her body. This is why her Magnificat never ceases to sound. As we recognize Christ in her, she must praise again “the Almighty who has done great things” in her.
If we can say that Mary herself is brought more deeply into an understanding of her own mystery by Elizabeth, by the baby that stirred in her womb, then it is worth our noting that what Mary has done in going to Elizabeth is in fact an act of charity. No sooner does the angel Gabriel leave her in the scene of the Annunciation, than Mary “hastens” to help her cousin Elizabeth. But in doing so, more than she realizes at first, she has brought the presence of Christ to someone. John the Baptist, whose destiny it is to announce the presence of the Lamb of God among us, makes his first announcement as he stirs in the womb of his mother. Is this not an icon of how Christian charity works? We “hasten” to do good to another and, more than we realize, the presence of Christ is carried to that other and recognition stirs within. This hastening is in the same spirit that St. Benedict urges on us in the Holy Rule, in chapter 72 “On the Good Zeal” of monks, where he says that monks “should each try to be the first to show respect to the other… and they should earnestly compete in obedience to one another.”
Today these Visitation graces are poured out on the Abbey of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The mother of our Lord has come to us. And she comes bringing us her Son. Now, in the Eucharist, we shall receive his Body and Blood and carry it in our own. With this new life in our bodies let us hasten to do good to one another and to all.
+ Fr Jeremy