Advent Message: Mary in the World (3)
In today’s Gospel story, Mary is perplexed by the greetings of the angel and the announcement of her pregnancy. She asks, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”
Through the Advent, we have been exploring all the worlds within our own world to meet Mary in our own terms, at the margins and in the everyday lives of people. We met Mary in the struggles of Asian women who create their own definition of their authentic self and liberation, finding power within themselves. We also found Mary in the Two-Spirit Metis woman who passed tobacco to elder after elder until she found the untold teachings from the knowledge holders who had retained the memory of the creation story in which Two-Spirt people featured and existed. Then, the Christian indigenous people’s journey of creative and decolonizing synthesis of their traditional ways and Christian spirituality. Today, I invite you to hold my hand and take an imaginary flight with me to meet Mary on the hill of Tepeyec, Mexico, and in the streets of run-down neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, Argentina. In order to do this, we must begin our story with The Virgin of Guadalupe.
According to my friend Phil Little, there is no other religious symbol more powerful in Latin America than Guadalupe (for example, not all Mexicans are Christian but all are Guadalupanos.) but, like many religious symbols, it can be contradictory.
The story begins with the time before the Spanish conquest (Conquista). The feminine goddess named Tonantzin was the earth and fertility goddess known as “Our Lady Mother.” Her sacred site was the hill of Tepeyec, on which a temple had been built. When the Spanish conquistador Cortes approached the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), the emperor Moctezuma II met the Spaniards at the temple of Tonantzin. The story goes that the invaders were most ungracious towards the Aztec welcoming committee; they knocked over the statue of the goddess and replaced her with a Madonna statue from Europe. This was a harbinger of worse things to come.
An Aztec convert who took the name Juan Diego was walking by the hill of Tepeyec one day in 1531. As Juan Diego walked by Tepeyec, a young brown-skinned woman who called herself “Coatlaxopeuh”, called out to him. Coa means snake; “xopeuh” meaning to crush serpents; (Gen 3:15) a close pronunciation of this name would be “quatlasupe”, which was similar in sound to Guadalupe. The conquered “indios” saw something incredible, empowering: She is brown and mestizo - the first Mexican. Guadalupe reminded them of the goddess Tonantzin who was so powerful that she stood blocking the rays of the sun, with her feet resting on the moon. So powerful is Guadalupe, yet she is still so gentle that her feet are cushioned by an angel holding a pillow on which she stands. She wears a dress adorned with native flowers of the region and she is wearing a waist sash indicating that she is pregnant. The “indios" identified with her, looking upon her as one of them. She is what Mexico will become - a blend of two cultures and two races, a new humanity. Guadalupe Tonantzin is the earth goddess, universal mother, speaking in the dialect of the poor, a pregnant young woman, about to give birth to a new reality, full of pregnant hope, not on the side of official history, but on the underside of history - with the poor, the oppressed, the subjugated. She’s Indigenous Mary, “Virgin Morena” (brown virgin), not a European queen.
Next, we fly to Buenos Aires. My elder, Marcella Althaus-Reid, whom I only met through her book (she died in 2009), invites us to her country. “Allow me to start by considering you as a prospective tourist to Buenos Aires. Allow me to advise you on that, as the Porteña that I am (a woman from the port of Buenos Aires). If you visit my city, Buenos Aires, please try to go and see the women lemon vendors who sit in the streets of some neighbourhoods. Go, for instance, to the old marketplace of Constitutión, where my mother used to buy a chicken still warm, with its feathers, and apples which had not yet lost the dust of the Patagonian trees. Please go for a walk around the sunny streets of my barrio, San Telmo, where stray dogs sleep in the doors of abandoned buildings, and prostitutes buy their newspapers at siesta time under the intense heat of summer. There is usually a sweet smell, that mixture of street garbage at the junctions of the Avenue Nueve de Julio, which mixes with the smells of flowers and baskets of lemons, onions and fresh herbs sold by the women who sit on the pavement. In summer they sweeten the air with parsley and lemons, but can you smell the odours of their sex? Perhaps they do not have underwear while they sit there with lemons and children, and give you change while wrapping parsley.”
Althaus-Reid tells us, these women, the lemon vendors, are “The survivors of the destruction of the indigenous narratives of Latin America”; they continue an indigenous tradition of not using underwear, defying the male gaze — the fragmented remnant of culture left after the destruction of the indigenous tradition of Latin America.
My elder, Althaus-Reid, challenges the decency system of church and theology, feminism and liberationists. Are we including the everyday lives of the people whose sexuality is indecent and who are poor in our stories? Who is Mary for the gender outlaws and the queer, the Virgin Mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe? What is theology to these women who sell lemons without any undergarments? Where and how do they belong in the traditional (European) nativity story? For example, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is the peasant young woman, but decent. Even for the liberationists, the image of a peasant Mary is still one of a clean-faced, smiling child-mother. Althaus-Reid remembers the young poor women from the villas miserias (slums) going around with dirty faces, short, ill-fitting dresses and vulnerable little plastic sandals, while their bodies start to tell stories of sexual abuse and harassment. The truth behind the cleaned-up, presentable Guadalupe: Poor women in Buenos Aires are seldom virgins. Women get pregnant before they know what their own sexuality is, before they can discover the divinity of love in their lives.
Yesterday I watched the Ted Talks by Christian Rodriguez. For the last five years, he was committed to the lives of the teenage mothers in Latin America. He started with the series of the photographs of the mother in birth, in his country, Uruguay. He is the son of the teenage mother. His sister became the teenage mother when she was sixteen. In the Philippine countries, 7.3 million girls under the age of 18 give birth each year. The teen pregnancy rate of Latin America will be the highest in the world for the next 80 years. In Mexico, almost one in two sexually active adolescents get pregnant in the ages between twelve and nineteen years old. Teenage pregnancy is not just about young pregnancies. It is about gender violence - physical, symbolic, psychological and economic violence - and is heightened due to poverty, limited education and limited locations of health care.
Families send boys to school, not girls. The child becomes life pressure for these mothers who often become a single mother. The heightened gender inequality gap continues the existence of the traditional roles. Educating girls is the key to break the cycles of teen pregnancies. Pregnancy among the girls younger than 15 has become a trend, not only in Latin America but in many parts in the developing world. Listening to Rodriguez, I asked, "What should we think about before praising and celebrating the nativity story which can be far from joy when it is the reality afflicted on many young poor and marginalized women in the world whose pregnancy was caused by gender-based violence and deep gender inequality?”
With this research of Mary in Latin America, (it’s only just a glimpse, it’s a huge world to study and explore…) what I wished to share with you as our Advent message is that Advent (which means “waiting”) must be waiting for the good news: The good news of the birth of Jesus who loved the prostitutes and the tax collectors. If we translate the old story to a new one of our time and place, the good news would be the birth of the Christ who is the divine lover and friend of the prostitutes, the poor women and the teenage mothers, immigrants and refugees and all outcasts, and all those who dream of a better world where each one’s dignity and full humanity - human rights - is affirmed, celebrated and protected.
If our waiting for the birth of Jesus is the holy journey, and his birth is the good news, the Angel’s annunciation, the news of pregnancy must be the good news of hope to Mary; indeed, Mary in the world: from Guadalupe Tonantzin, Virgin Morena (brown Virgin) to the lemon vendors of Buenos Aires and the teenage mothers in Latin America — and the best of news to us, who live in this global village of the God whose liberating love changes our stories forever.
Hymn: She Walked in the Summer (VU 12)
Hymn: She Walked in the Summer (VU 12)
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