Roomin' House Blues

Today we is the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which for me is one of the most important feast days of the Virgin  Mary.  It is important to me because it reminds me of the incarnational nature of Christianity. When the Son of God became man be took on permanently, the stuff of this earth, and redeemed it.  And that stuff was not only physical flesh but the culture of man.  Everywhere that Christianity has gone it has adopted or adapted everything good from the culture that was there before and used those things to point to God. When Christianity arrived in the Americas the cultural shift, the adoption of culture was even more radical.  Here a culture was born of the fusion of various Indian peoples with imported African slaves, pure Castilian Spaniards and Moreno Spaniards.  It was a culture that was European, Indian, African and Arabic. It was mestizo culture. The Virgin of Guadalupe became the common denominator...

Today, December 12th, is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of Mexico and patroness of the Americas.  She is also venerated by Native Americans. As it is Sunday this year, it will not be celebrated at mass, although it may be mentioned in the homilies.  However, a few days ago, the Feast of Juan Diego, provided a second feast commemorating the events around the miraculous appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The origin of the tapestry showing the Virgin of Guadalupe, according to Catholic tradition, starts on December 9th, 1531, when Juan Diego, an Indian peasant, saw a vision of a young woman, who told him to have the local bishop build a church in that spot. The Bishop, a Franciscan demanded proof, and three days later he returned to the spot where he found flowers blooming in winter, itself miraculous. The Virgin instructed him to pick these and wrap them in his clock.  She herself...