Throughout this Season of Advent, the Church’s teaching and practice urges us to focus on our need to wait faithfully for the coming of Jesus and to prepare our hearts while we wait. We are to ‘Make straight the way of the Lord” as John the Baptist told the people, quoting the prophet Isaiah. (Jn 1:23).
That straight path might be understood in two ways. First, we make the way of the Lord straight by removing any obstacles of sin or indifference that we might put in His way. It would be unworthy to make the Savior trod a path toward us cluttered and uncared for, suggesting His approach and arrival are little valued.
Secondly, we must prepare a path for Him that is straight to our own hearts. He comes to us but will not force Himself upon us. He comes in love and that means we must open our hearts and invite Him into our daily lives.
Apart from Jesus Himself, the second most important person in the Christmas narrative is Mary, for many reasons. Of course she is the mother of Jesus. The plan of God required a mother for Jesus to enter the world among us taking on human nature fully, to share with us the experiences even of birth and of death.
Mary, however, has a greater importance than her humanly maternal role. She is the model for the world, the Church and for all of human history, of how to “make straight the way of the Lord.”
How many times over the centuries in the reading of the Gospels, in prayers, in hymns and in sacred art has the encounter between Mary and the Archangel Gabriel depicted the straight path to Mary’s heart. Sinless from birth, she overcomes fear and astonishment to willingly offer herself to God according to the angel’s word.
Mary, however, is the greatest and most faithful disciple, as well as Christ’s mother. She makes straight the highway of God by her charity in visiting Elizabeth, by her faithful vigil at the foot of the cross, and as a source of faith and prayer for the early Church.
This Friday, Dec. 12, we celebrate another example of Mary making straight the Lord’s way in the life of the Church. In 1531, the indigenous population in Mexico was in great turmoil. The Spanish had arrived a mere 12 years earlier. Along with their conquest, they brought the Catholic faith to Mexico.
Their military success overthrew the pagan Aztecs with their local alliance and their rituals of human sacrifice. But in so doing, they brought turbulence to the local culture. And resistance to the message of the Gospel added to a sense of the local people being lost and without hope.
On Dec.12, 1531, Mary appeared to an early convert to the faith, Juan Diego, and gave him out-of-season roses to take to the local archbishop. We still celebrate the miracle of the roses and the image of Mary on the tilma (still on display in Mexico) as we honor our Lady of Guadalupe as the Mother of the Americas, again “making straight the way of the Lord.”
As a result of that appearance of Our Lady, an estimated 10 million Indigenous people converted to the faith in the following decade. A sense of hope was given to the Indigenous people, a hope based in God’s presence and love, not in military power or human rulers. Even through the historical challenges of the centuries since then, Mary’s appearance has continually reminded the world of the power of God’s love and grace.
Of course, even today the Mexican community along with the wider Hispanic culture and faithful of all origins celebrate Our Lady of Guadalupe with Masses, mañanitas, and cultural celebrations. We will do so again this Friday.
In the midst of Advent, Our Lady of Guadalupe is a great reminder of Mary’s loving care for the world, because in this image she is so visibly the mother of Jesus and our mother who makes a path for God straight to our hearts.
