Introduction
We have explored in previous reflections how difficulties experienced in life can give rise to temptations to avoid the summons of Our Lady. When Saint Juan Diego’s uncle, Juan Bernardino, became deathly ill, Juan Diego, seeking a priest to hear his uncle’s confession and prepare his soul for death, tried to avoid a personal encounter with Our Lady, believing that her mission would delay his ostensibly noble cause. Yet notwithstanding his intentions, she appeared to him and offered him her maternal consolation. “Am I not here, I who have the honor to be your mother?” and “Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms?” (Nican Mopohua, no. 119) Our Lady assured her heroic messenger that his uncle would not die.
Saint Juan Diego believed her, and his humble trust was more than rewarded, for the final message from Our Blessed Mother would be the capstone of Guadalupe and the heart of the conversion of the Americas. She told him to ascend to the rocky Hill of Tepeyac to gather roses in the winter. For his part, he immediately fulfilled her request, as the incontrovertible proof of Our Lady’s appearances. The account tells us:
And then Juan Diego climbed the little hill, and when he reached the top, he marveled at how many flowers were spread out there, their blossoms were open, flowers of every kind, lovely and beautiful, like those of Castille, when it was not yet their season because it was when the frost was worst. The flowers were giving off an extremely soft fragrance, like precious pearls, as if filled with the night’s dew. Right away he began to cut them, gathered them all and put them in the hollow of his tilma. The top of the little hill was certainly not a place in which any flowers grew, because it was rocky, there were burs, thorny plants, prickly pear, and an abundance of mesquite bushes. And though some small grasses might grow, it was then the month of December, in which the ice eats everything up and destroys it. (Nican Mopohua, no. 127-133)
The miraculous flowers were but part of the reward of Saint Juan Diego’s humble trust. God granted an even more remarkable and enduring sign of all that He wished to accomplish in His merciful love by leaving permanently the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on Saint Juan Diego’s Tilma. It was the Tilma that became both the miraculous proof of Our Lady’s apparitions and the catalyst for the conversion of millions of souls.
Take Saint Juan Diego as your model in your every thought, word, and action, so that you may serve God in all things, both great and small. Commit yourselves to be, with the Mother of God, a messenger of God’s merciful love in your homes, in your offices or schools, and in any place in which you find yourselves. Be humble, recognizing that all that you are and have comes from God. Be confident that, if you respect God’s plan for you and for our world, you will be blessed, and you will bring a blessing to others.
As true children of God, with humility and confidence, like Saint Juan Diego, let us be one with the Virgin Mother of God in giving our hearts completely to the Lord. Calling upon the intercession of Saint Juan Diego, we pray for the humility to be always ready to do whatever God asks of us, and we pray for the trust that He will bring to a good conclusion our humble efforts to serve Him faithfully in even the smallest matters.
