The Book Report episode 34: The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei tlamahuicoltica(The Great Event) of 1649

J ‘Land of flowers’- another phrase for heaven

© ‘My daughter’- Nochpochtzine, meaning “an expression of great respect”

® ‘I am going to your home’ “Mochantzinco- to refer to a distant place as the home of the interlocutor was another device of polite speech in older Nahuatl.”

The original ‘The Story of Guadalupe’ was published in 1649 in Nahuatl, the native language of Juan Diego. The author, Laso de la Vega was a priest and in the introduction, they call him the vicar of Guadalupe. This version of the book has one page in Nahuatl and the other page in English. There are some side notes talking about some of the words in Nahuatl. A person who is Nahuatl is ‘a member of a group of peoples native to southern Mexico and Central America, including the Aztecs.’ (dictionary.com). Juan Diego was a part of one of these groups.

 This book tells the story of when the Virgin Mary appears to a poor man named Juan Diego so he can tell the bishop to build a church in her honor. Growing up in a Catholic family and going to Catholic school as a child, I remember hearing this story a lot. So, I’d thought I start off the Christmas season by telling the story of how Jesus’s mother appeared to a peasant just North of Mexico City.

Nican mopohua (Here it is told)

            It was a Saturday morning in December 1531 when Juan Diego was walking his regular path, as he approached the hill Tepeyacac it was getting light, and he heard birds chirping. He said to himself, “Am I so fortunate or deserving as to hear this? Am I just dreaming it? Am I imagining it in sleepwalking? Where am I? Where do I find myself? Is it in the land of flowersJ, the land of plentiful crops, the place of which our ancient forefathers used to speak? Is this the land of heaven?” He heard a woman’s voice calling him, so he followed the voice. He was not scared or distressed, he was happy and content searching for the source of the voice. Approaching the top of the hill, he was amazed at the sight of a women standing there. “When he came before her, he greatly marveled at how she completely surpassed everything in her total splendor. Her cloths were like the sun in the way they gleamed and shone. Her resplendence struck the stones and boulders by which she stood so that they seemed like precious emeralds and jeweled bracelets. The ground sparkled like a rainbow, and the mesquite, the prickly pear cactus, and other various kinds of weeds that grow there seemed like green obsidian, and their foliage like fine turquoise. Their stalks, their thorns and spines gleamed like gold.”

            As Juan Diego prostrated before her, she started talking to him and asked where he was going. He answered that he was going to Tlateloco to ‘pursue divine matters’. “My patron, noble lady, my daughter, © I am going to your home® of Mexico-Tlateloco.”  At that time, she reviled to him that she was indeed the Virgin Mary and that she wanted him to tell the bishop that she wanted a church built on the hill. “I greatly wish and desire that they build my temple for me here, where I will manifest, make known, and give to people all my love, compassion, aid, and protection. There I will listen to their weeping and their sorrows in order to remedy and heal all their various afflictions, miseries and torments.” She instructs Juan Diego to go and tell the bishop Don Fray Juan de Zumarraga all that happened on Tlateloco and tell him her message. She also told him “And rest assured that I will be very grateful for it, and I will reward it, for I will enrich you and make you content for it.”

            I wonder what he was thinking after he saw Mary for the first time. Did he have his doubts? I’m sure. But what made him think he can accomplish what she was asking? How can Juan Diego, a poor Indian peasant from Mexico, convince a bishop to build a church? What gave him the courage and the strength to even try and see the bishop? He did what he was told and went to see the bishop, although he waited quite a while and when the bishop finally saw him, Juan Diego explained what he saw and what the blessed Mother wanted, but the bishop told him to come again, another words the bishop didn’t believe him and thought he was making it all up.

            Juan Diego went back to the hill the same day to see Mary and she was there waiting for him. When he saw her, he begged and pleaded to ask someone else, a priest or someone closer to the bishop, “For I am a poor ordinary man, I carry burdens with the tumpline and carrying frame, I am one of the common people, one who is governed. Where you are sending me is not my usual place, my daughter, my youngest child, O personage, O Lady. Parden me if I cause you concern, if I incur or bring upon myself your frown or wrath, O personage, O my Lady.” The Virgin Mary responded by telling him to be assured that he was the messenger that she wanted, and to go to the bishop again and return with whatever answer that he received.

            The next day Juan Diego returned to the bishop, pleading with him to please believe him, and telling him that it wasn’t his wish, but the blessed Mothers wish to build a temple for her. The bishop said that he cannot trust in his word alone. The bishop ordered Juan Diego to bring him a sign to prove that it was really the blessed Virgin that wanted the temple and that it wasn’t just a fairy tale he made up. “He said that it was not by his [Juan Diego’s] word and request alone that what he asked for would be done and carried out. Some additional sign was still very much needed so that it could be believed that it was really the heavenly Lady herself who sent him.” Juan Diego responded by saying that he would get a sign and the bishop sent him away.

            The bishop sent some people that he trusted to follow Juan Diego to see where he would go. As they were following him, they lost Juan Diego and couldn’t find him. This angered the people so they told the bishop not to trust him [Juan Diego] and, “They insisted that if he should come again, should he return, they would seize him on the spot and punish him severely, so that he would never lie and disturb people again.”

            The next day, on a Monday, Juan Diego went to his uncles’ house and found out he was dying. The uncle told Juan Diego to go get a priest so he can hear his confession before he passes away. On that Tuesday morning, Juan Diego does what he is asked and looks for a priest but realizing he would bump into Mary, and she would tell him to give the bishop the sign, he took another route and decided to go see her later. “He believed that if he went around there, she who sees absolutely everywhere would not be able to see him. He saw her coming down from the hill where she was watching, where he had seen her before.” She greeted him and asked “Well my youngest child, where are you going? Where are you headed?” He knelt before her and explained that his uncle was dying and needed to find a priest to hear his confession and that he will tend to the sign later. Mary told him not to worry about his uncle, that he was going to be fine. Reading what she said next stung a little bit, it made me feel guilty when I complain and worry about things, but it comforted me, like everything was going to be ok. She told Juan Diego “Do not be concerned, do not fear the illness, or any other illness or calamity. Am I, your mother, not here? Are you not under my protective shade, my shadow? Am I not your happiness? Are you not in the security of my lapfold, in my carrying gear? Do you need something more? Do not let anything worry you or upset you further.” She continues “Do not let your uncle’s illness worry you, for he will not die of what he now has. Rest assured, for he has already recovered.”

            Juan Diego responded by asking her to give him a sign to show the bishop so he can believe that it was coming from Mary. The Virgin Mary instructed him to go to the top of the hill where Juan Diego first saw her, pick various flowers, and bring them back to her. Now this was winter and there was a terrible frost, nothing should be growing at this time, much less blooming. But Juan Diego did what he was told and as he approached the top of the hill, he saw many beautiful flowers. They smelled very beautiful, and the night dew on them were like precious pearls.” He picked the flowers from out of the ground, put them in his cloak and brought them back to his precious mother. When she saw the flowers, Mary put them in her arms and put them back in his cloak explaining to him “I give you very strict orders to unfold your cloak only before the bishop and show you what you are carrying.” Again, she instructed Juan Diego to tell the bishop everything that she had told him, everything that happened and to tell him that she wants the temple on top of the hill.

Juan Diego went on his way to meet the bishop, enjoying himself along the way, smelling those beautiful flowers that he was holding in his cloak. When he arrived at the bishop’s palace, the bishops’ helpers came to meet him, realizing who he was they ignored him when he asked to see the bishop, they were told by other helpers that he was lying. After a while, Juan Diego sat with his head down, waiting, still enjoying the smell of the flowers. When the people saw that he had not moved in a very long time, they started to get curious. Even more so, they started to wonder what he was holding in his cloak. They started to ask what he was holding, and they even started pushing him, trying to open his cloak. Juan Diego realized that they might destroy the flowers or even beat him, so he let them peek inside. When the people realized that it was flowers he was holding, they tried to take some for themselves, but every time they tried to grab one, the flowers turned into the woven fabric of the cloak.

            After a while the helpers went for the bishop and told him that “the humble commoner who had come several times was wanting to see him and that now he had been waiting there for a very long time.” The bishop, hoping that Juan Diego brought a sign that would convince him to build the temple “gave orders that he should enter immediately and that he would see him.”

            When Juan Diego saw the bishop, he bowed to him and told him that the Virgin gave him orders to go to the top of the hill, and there he saw such amazing flowers that are not supposed to grow in that area, especially in December in the middle a frost. “She sent me to the top of the hill where I had seen her before to go cut various kinds of Spanish flowers. When I had cut them, I had brought them back to her down there below. She took them in her arms, then put them back in the folds of my cloak in order that I might bring them back to you and give them to you in person. Although I fully realized that the top of the hill is not a place where flowers grow, that it is only a place of crags, thorns, brambles, cactus, and mesquite, I did not for that reason have any doubts.”

            See, Juan Diego thought the flowers alone were the sign, the proof that it was truly the Virgin herself that he had seen. Juan Diego was trying to convince the bishop that the sign was real, and he asked the bishop to please accept these beautiful, blooming flowers as proof of what he had witnessed. So there in front of the bishop, he opened his cloak, and what the bishop saw next made him weep and fall to his knees. “Thereupon he spread out his white cloak, in the folds of which he was carrying the flowers, and as all different kinds of Spanish flowers scattered to the ground, the precious image of the consummate Virgin Saint Mary, mother of God the deity, was imprinted and appeared on the cloak, just as it is today where it is kept in her precious home, her temple of Tepeyacac, called Guadalupe.”

            After a day, Juan Diego went to visit his uncle, but he wasn’t able to go alone because many people had followed him. When he arrived at his uncles, Juan Diego told him what had happened and was amazed that he made a full recovery. His uncle told him that the Virgin cured him of his illness and that she visited him just as Juan Diego saw her at the top of that hill.

            “There was a movement in all altepetls everywhere of people coming to see and marvel at her precious image. They came to show their devotion and pray to her; they marveled greatly at how it was by a divine miracle that she had appeared, that absolutely no earthly person had painted her precious image.”

            “The original shrine was built near the hill of Tepevac in the 16 century.” (khou.com) The cloak of Juan Diego is still intact and can be viewed in the basilica in Mexico City. The clock was made up of cheap material but after a little over 400 years, the image is still visible.

            I’ve been thinking about it and people say that every religious story, fable, myth, or very old story that has been passed down has a purpose, a lesson embedded in the tale. Although I love the story of Juan Diego, I never really thought about the message of it until now. Juan Diego went to the bishop numerous times; he wasn’t successful the first time he asked. So, the first lesson that pops in my head is that you have to be persistent with anything you want to achieve. Like the saying goes, ‘if at first you don’t succeed try again’. Another little kernel of wisdom is to have faith. When Juan Diego avoids Mary because his uncle was sick, what she said next really stuck with me “Am I, your mother not here?” Faith doesn’t mean that you think that you’re always going to get what you want, faith, at least to me, is realizing that whatever happens, I’m going to be alright. I will get through whatever is troubling me. If you know the story of Guadalupe and can find some more lessons, I would love to hear what you think about it. Comment below and tell me what you think. Thank you and as always, I hope you enjoyed reading The Book Report.