The epitome of love

The epitome of love

December 12 marks the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron of the Americas,
a continual inspiration for the Art of Loving

Perhaps you know the story: on December 9, 1531, on his way to Mexico City via Tepeyac Hill, a peasant named Juan Diego saw a vision of a young woman surrounded by light, whom he recognized as the Virgin Mary. Speaking the local dialect, she asked that a church be built there in her honor.

Hearing what had happened, the Spanish bishop told Juan Diego to return to the site and ask for a sign to prove her identity. The Lady then instructed Juan Diego to gather some flowers at the top of the hill, even though it was winter. He found Castilian roses, typical of the bishop’s homeland, and she told him to present them to the bishop. When he showed the bishop the roses in his cloak, the well-known image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which features symbols of both Spanish and indigenous peoples, appeared imprinted on the cloth.

Visiting the shrine there in June 1997, Focolare founder Chiara Lubich asked herself why she felt that this Mary had so much to do with the Focolare (also called the Work of Mary). “Because Our Lady of Guadalupe is Our Lady of Love,” she realized, “and love is our spirituality.”

In her appearance at Tepeyac, Mary’s love is evident both in her message and in her image. At no point in the account is there any indication of divine retribution or impending chastisement. Nor does she arrive with specific instructions about what to do or what to change.

Instead, as theologian Maxwell Johnson observed, what the Virgin of Guadalupe simply requested was a “temple” or “home” where “all people might find love, compassion, help and protection, and where the laments of all people would be heard.” Mary’s method is to create a space where everyone can experience what it means to be loved. Whatever “conversion” is worked is simply a consequence of this experience of being loved and loving in return.

Her image on the cloak is also an invitation to immerse ourselves in the beauty of being loved, precisely within one’s own ethnic, social, cultural and religious identity.

During her visit to the shrine, Chiara traced her affinity with Our Lady of Guadalupe as a model of the Gospel-based Art of Loving. Mary is first of all a model of universal love, a love that asks us to go beyond the appearance of beautiful or ugly, of fellow countryman or stranger, in order to love everyone. “She loved the indigenous and the Spanish,”
Chiara observed.

Mary of Guadalupe is also a model of what it means to take the initiative in loving. “She unexpectedly appeared to an indigenous person, so as to highlight, among other things, the preferences of Jesus,” Chiara noted. “In a time when the indigenous people were living their terrible Good Friday, she showed herself not to those who were dominant in that time, but to an indigenous person, speaking his language.”
Mary exemplifies how love becomes tangible. “Supernatural love, we know, is not nourished by sentiment, nor just a little kindness or solidarity or almsgiving,” Chiara explained. In Guadalupe, Mary did not simply appear; she also “brought relief and happiness.”

Finally, Mary of Guadalupe is the epitome of what Chiara calls “making ourselves one” — the process of entering into the world of another person “in order to understand them and share their joys and sufferings.”
Making ourselves one is the most authentic foundation for enculturating the life of the Gospel in a variety of settings. Our Lady of Guadalupe helps us understand what it means to welcome, “with humility and gratitude, that something valid offered by the culture of our brothers and sisters.” Only on this basis can the life of the Gospel “penetrate into the depths of people’s souls and bring with it its revolution.”

And because Mary of Guadalupe enters so completely into human experience, we can look to her for the qualities of love at the heart of the life of God.

Amy Uelmen directs the Fordham Law School Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work in New York.