Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe: Communicating Beauty

My initial impulse upon receiving the invitation to participate in Guadalupe – At the Break of Dawn, I have to admit, was not to say “yes.” A wonderful, ambitious project it certainly was, but I was not sure I was a good fit as a contributor.

The years-long planned endeavor broadly had a “spirituality” focus and that was my area of study. But the specifics of Guadalupe — At the Break of Dawn seemed to fall outside the radius of my particular expertise: early Modern Catholicism. True, Marian themes had punctuated my scholarship since the beginning and I had, in fact, published a book in 2013 based on seven years of ethnographic and historical research on contemporary Marian devotion in Los Angeles, the largest and most multicultural Catholic archdiocese in the world. Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is clearly omnipresent in L.A.; her devotees there are legion. But I knew that Guadalupe cannot be seen as primarily another appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as much as present day Catholicism claims and honors her as their “Empress of the Americas.” Plus, there are so many fine scholars whose work focuses explicitly on Guadalupe in her multifold identities.

But I was also aware that, synchronistic as it might be, my attention had in fact turned again, after several years lapse, to the Marian milieu. A careful reading of a newly published and quite startling study by a medievalist caused me to rethink what I assumed about what is known as the “Little Office of Our Lady,” a liturgical office commonly recited alongside the classic daily office in religious communities in the medieval and early modern world. What caught my attention was the extent to which the pre-reformation Christian community clearly read the entire scriptural canon with an eye to detecting Marian references and prophecies. Plus, my husband’s retirement reading list on the history of the California missions and their controversies had led me to the singular story of an early 17^th century nun known as the “Lady in Blue” whose (to some, fantastical, yet to others, inspired) authorship of “The Mystical City of God” gave voice to an existing florid Mariology far from present day tastes but utterly familiar and beloved by the Catholic missionaries who earlier evangelized the Americas. The Little Office and Our Lady’s identity was brought to the new world in which the Guadalupe encounter occurred, an event which has taken on such multilayered significance over the centuries. I began to wonder about the connection.

This dip back into rethinking things Marian brought up for me what was a tender nostalgia for those Guadalupe ceremonies and rituals in which I participated in my long L.A. academic pilgrimage. The heightened sense of sacred presence, the fragrant and abundant floral offerings, the sweetness of the beloved songs filling the air at dawn at las mañanitas, the palpable sense of communal longing and entrustment that saturated the archdiocese in the mid-weeks of December: her time. Yes, I know she can be controversial: a buttress for the oppression of women and the protectress of drug lords. But the deeply sensate and affective encounter with her devotees had already caused me to reconsider the relationship between what today tends to be included in the arena of “spirituality” (lectio divina, labyrinth walking, non-discursive prayer practices) and the richly varied and embodied practices of popular piety, which have for some centuries been viewed with condescending eyes.

So, my initial hesitation became a hesitant yes. What I find myself considering now is a question asked of me during the May 2021 virtual conversations of Guadalupe — At the Break of Dawn. How is she different or the same as other expressions of Marian presence? Clearly, countless countries, peoples, cities, communities, ideological, theological and historical eras have their own “Marys.” Each “Mary” responds graciously and utterly to the longings of these diverse peoples in language, dress and message that is unique. Guadalupe is no different in this regard than, for example, Vietnam’s Our Lady of La Vang or Poland’s Czestochowska. And, as suggested, she flourishes both within and spills outside the boundaries of the Catholic Marian tradition. Perhaps, while not alone among Marys, she does this with a certain abandon. Again, perhaps Guadalupe is fairly unusual, but not unique, in that she is visibly pregnant, a harbinger of a newness that is emerging in explored and unexplored ways.

But mostly, I find myself musing on the eschatological overtones of the “Mexican” Madonna: the scented, flower-bedecked, exquisitely tender beauty that she so often communicates. How that beauty seems to ease into an embrace with the fleshy, embodied shape of the elemental longings of the human heart. In a theological tradition in which eschatology (the study of how we imagine not just “last things” but ultimacy itself and its present intimations) is so often abstract, hierarchical, far off and cast as “perfection,” I wonder what it is that Guadalupe beckons us toward and allows us to glimpse now?

Editor’s Note: Wendy M. Wright, Ph.D. is professor emerita of theology at Creighton University. She was a featured panelist in the May 2021 launch event for Guadalupe – At the Break of Dawn, the multi-year project from IACS and Loyola Marymount University. Dr. Wright’s book The Lady of the Angels and Her City was published in 2013 by Liturgical Press.

View her Guadalupe – At the Break of Dawn webinar.