Our Lady of Guadalupe

In ancient Mexico
they built high
altars
for human sacrifice,
step after sorrowful step
gushed and ran red
with the lives
of the poor
enslaved to a
religion
which gouged and robbed
them of their hearts.
The priests and cultists
of the Way of Fear
hung the still beating
hearts- quivering talismans-
round the waist of
the insatiable goddess.
Into the nightmare
and unspeakable suffering
of a people still haunted
by their ancestral past,
just outside Mexico City,
on a hill
in a little spot
known simply as
Tepeyac,
came a mere
slip of a girl
draped in a starlit
turquoise mantle,
haloed by a mandorla
of tongues of fire
and perched on that
moon of dark memory...
Mary,
ever so slightly
nodding,
with the most
tender
gentle
humble
and loving gaze
one could ever imagine.
She appeared pregnant
full of the Word,
burning with the
Love within.
She brought roses
to the skeptical
wonders and a teaching
to the very Church
she images
and left
her blessed visit
ever-sealed
on the clothes
of a poor man.
Her message
rings out anew
in this year of
Jubilee,
this Favorable Time:

"I listen to your

weeping and solace

all your sorrows

and your sufferings."

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• Icons by Fr. William McNichols

• Information on obtaining Icons by Fr. William McNichols

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This page is managed by Fr. Raymond A. Bucko, S.J. of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Creighton University. E-Mail: bucko@creighton.edu Page Last Updated: December 1, 2001

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