Today is the day celebrated throughout Mexico and other countries as the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who, as the story goes, appeared to a poor indigenous peasant Juan Diego. When he went to the Archbishop to tell him of the apparition, he was not believed. Three days later, he returned and opened his cloak revealing Castilian roses.
This story tells us that we find God in the most unexpected places, and that those places are miraculous, not because of blooming roses on a barren hill in Mexico, but because it is in those places that God breaks into our lives.
Like the Archbishop, those in power expect God to speak to them – and them only. Why would God speak to an illiterate peasant? Why would God speak through the poor and marginalized? Listening to what the poor and marginalized have to say is one way God speaks to us, we who, like the Archbishop, live in comfort.
Prayer for the Day
Disquieting us, O God, you break into our lives where we least expect it,
And we struggle to understand why you come at this time and place;
Upsetting our equilibrium, O Lord, you call us to listen to the world,
Even as we are focused on our own lives and desires.
Continue to shake us, O Holy One, you who appear to us,
Creating disturbance in our preconceived ideas of who we are.
In the name of the One who disturbs us into justice,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
We recognize the misshapen offspring of tragedy while growing blind to the events that had giving birth to it in the first place.
Ayşegül Savaş, Turkish born American writer
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de St. Exupéry, French writer (1900-1944)
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
It is God who sits above the circle of the earth,
And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
And spreads them like a tent to live in;
Who brings princes to naught,
And makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
Isaiah 40: 21-23