The Love of Our Mother

Let nothing discourage you, nothing depress you.
Let nothing alter your heart or your countenance.
Am I not here who am your Mother?
- Our Lady of Guadalupe to St. Juan Diegito and us

The Lord is near.
Have no anxiety at all, but in everything,
by prayer and petition, full of gratitude,
make known your requests to God.
Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding
will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
- St. Paul to the Philippians and us

From now on,
don't worry about anything any more, ever.
- Jesus to little Marcel Van and us

Cancer update:
For those in a hurry like Juan Diego today trying to avoid Our Lady so that he could find a priest for his uncle - and doesn't that put a smile on your face straight off??? - here is the latest on my wonderfully fun and undramatic cancer journey:

Praise God with me, please! In fact, hating to descend from the heights of Tepayac to the boring depths of cancer treatment, let's start this way:

Shout for joy, O daughter Zion!
Sing joyfully, O Israel!
Be glad and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem.
The Lord has removed the judgment against you
He has turned away your enemies;
the King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst,
you have no further misfortune to fear!
On that day, it shall be said to Jerusalem:
Fear not, O Zion, be not discouraged!
The Lord, your God, is in your midst,
a mighty savior;
He will rejoice over you with gladness,
and renew you in His love,
He will sing joyfully because of you,
as one sings at festivals.
-the prophet Zephaniah, reading for Gaudete (Rejoice!) Sunday, 3rd week of Advent

In practical terms this means that my treatment has been going super well!
Your love, prayers, meals (for those who are local), smiles, emails, cards, Masses - in short, your charity - is working miracles!

The original prognosis was good, and I had a surgery (outpatient!) on St. Monica's Day (Aug 27) that got out the little lump of cancer. Then after a consultation and tests with City of Hope (yay, City of Hope! God bless all there!), we decided on chemotherapy to reduce chance of recurrence from 16% to 9%.

I have had two infusions of chemo so far, the first on the feast of St. Albert the Great and All Carmelite Souls (Nov 15) and the second just last week on St. Nicholas Day (Dec 6). Both were amazing!

There are three weeks of rest in between each (of 4 total) chemo infusions. The first three weeks went mildly by and brought us to Advent. Now this cycle (I am in the second three weeks) is a little harder, but not too much. There are myriad meds and protocols (fancy Nancy word for things to do) that help tons with any possible side effects, and to answer the super concerned and sweet question on everyone's mind and lips: Thanks be to God, no, I have felt no nausea! I was reassured from the beginning by the 4 levels of medication they have available in case I do feel nauseous (which tends to restore ones confidence in scientific progress!) - but by God's mercy and your prayers, nausea has simply not been a problem.

Sometimes I am awake more than I used to be, but I love my home and have plenty to do even in the wee hours. We are preparing for a wedding here, and that is SO JOYFUL that the conjunction with Advent and a couple of prescribed steroids means I am over the moon, almost literally. Okay, not really almost literally. But still, I am very, very happy and peaceful.

One gift I have been given that brings us back to today's GLORIOUS feast is the gift of freedom from fear. I have done nothing to earn this, it is entirely a gift, and your prayers are no doubt responsible. But in a nutshell: No part of this cancer journey has been scary, not from the original call back from a routine mammogram, not from the part where they needed to see me again and yet again to check if it might be, um, a problem, not from the day my primary saintly doctor told me with sadness in his voice that it was cancer (but we would beat it!) - not when my surgical oncologist told me he was sorry for my bad luck and I started arguing with him! I didn't have a problem with the diagnosis, but I had a huge problem with calling it bad luck!

Anyway, thanks to your love and God's, it has all been good luck. I call it "drama with no sin." I'm the kind of person who wanted (this time literally) to be an actress when I grew up. Now I get to act like I have cancer, and everyone is SO NICE to cancer patients! I have lost most of my hair (a wisp here and there is not flattering, but scarves and hats are SO cute on me!) - and this is great for authenticity. It was getting embarrassing accepting (and I do so gladly accept - I think I could be called a taker rather than a giver :) so much kindness when I had to say, "How am I? Well I feel great!" Now at least I can say, "I feel great, praise God," but the subtext can be: "Though I bet you don't want to be me because I am now a baldish woman!"

What's a little baldness in the service of making us all saints?
One of my favorite memories is when my husband and I traveled the arduous path to LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) to pick up my dear in-laws who had been, in their 80s, traveling for 24 hours across the country to escape a hurricane. We found each other in the belly of the LAX beast, and there was my dear mother in law clutching a Trader Joe's brown paper bag to her chest because it contained all their important documents! My father in law was in need of knee surgery and had limped and loped along 3000 miles, so now we had a wheelchair for him. 

He, like every other elderly or infirm person at LAX that night, refused it.

I made a solemn vow at that moment, nothing too formal, just, "When it's my turn, I will accept the wheelchair!"
Believe me, I wanted it that night and should have asked! Just because I'm a lazy bum, and thankfully Our Lady and Marcel have taught me in a particular passage from Conversations to be proud of it!
Marcel is doing what we do and feeling guilty and blaming himself even though he's done nothing super particularly wrong. He just hates the job he's been assigned because it is actually something he doesn't know how to do, and Our Lady says to him (I paraphrase):

"Little Flower, Marcel, I know you think you are lazy. You are not lazy. But even if you were lazy, just remember that I want you to be even more lazy! That will make me happy."

How good mothers are!
I was recently recounting how my mother failed me at the eleventh hour, the night before my wedding. Knowing she needed her sleep more than I did, she went to bed, leaving me up with my 9 month pregnant matron of honor/best friend (who had an hour drive back home to her husband) to finish the seating plan for the reception!

Oh mom! I forgive you! How good you were to set a boundary and get your sleep. And I think, though I never thought of it before, I can just use that moment - not getting anywhere near enough sleep the night before my wedding because after I finished the seating plan I remembered I had to pack for the honeymoon, and if that (packing for a trip with my husband) hasn't become the metaphor of my weakness and poverty, well . . . someone get me a wheelchair! I think that night of not enough sleep on the vigil of Happily Ever After might just be the reason life has been so very . . . . fallen!

Or then again, it could just be the Fall!

So. What about Our Lady of Guadalupe?
So much to tell!
I am going to do this to keep it simple.
I am going to give you a couple of links to articles I have online about her. The history is so splendid, I'd hate for you to miss out on it just because I'm lazy (which she is all about, which is why I adore her!).

Then I am going to transcribe a passage from this marvelous book I recommend by this marvelous saintly friend I recommend:
Am I Not Your Mother (published by Magnificat)
by Servant of God Archbishop Luis Maria Martinez 

So first, here are the links:

With St. Juan Diego to the Merciful Mother

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of the Very Littlest Ones

And now, on to dear Archbishop Martinez. He was primate (head honcho bishop guy) in Mexico before and during and after the awful Civil War where little St Jose and the Cristeros and Blessed Miguel Pro shouted "Viva Cristo Rey!" and were martyred because they wouldn't reject the Faith that was their heart. They made a great choice because how can you live without your heart? Or as Jesus says, "What good if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?"

So they lost their mortal lives, but no biggie, they gained Christ completely.
The problem, as my FDIL has put it so beautifully, is that while it can be easy to die for Christ, how do you live for Him?

In other words, for those NOT martyred in the Mexican persecution of all Catholics that raged about 100 years ago, how did they live, day to day, hour to hour, in such an environment of hatred and oppression? It was not entirely unlike today. That is, it was like today. I love our world and all the ins and  outs of it, but if you want to live really well, like say pet a horse now and then, that is not easily had. I mention this example because yesterday I got to pet a horse. Probably the first time in ten years. And I love horses. But they just don't seem to show up at my suburban doorstep, and that is a sign of how cut off we are from what really matters. (No, I don't actually want a horse for Christmas, nor even a puppy. I am so glad to be getting a daughter, and I can always drive back to the bucolic country estate where I found the horse.)

So the good Servant of God Archbishop Luis had the task of rousing the hearts of his flock in the midst of wolves. He did so by helping them in their dire poverty to rebuild and refurbish the awesome temple of Our Lord requested by Our Lady. This temple was, namely, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe which houses, first and foremost, Jesus in the most Blessed Sacrament, and then on a much lesser (infinitely less) scale, it houses the miraculous tilma Our Lady gave to Juan Diego on this day, December 12, almost 500 years ago. (It will be 500 years in 2031. If anyone wants to go on a pilgrimage to Lisieux with me that year, it may be less crowded).

When they blessed the finished shinier Basilica, Archbishop Luis gave a novena of Masses, a series of homilies and liturgies for the community of Mexico City. Here is what he said in the first homily, speaking about the first words Our Lady said to Juan Diego on the day they first met, December 9, which we now celebrate as St. Juan Diego day.

From Servant of God Archbishop Luis Martinez:

Do we remember the first word that the Blessed Virgin pronounced on the summit of the Hill? It was a word of love, a word of incomparable predilection: "My son, Juan Diego, whom I love tenderly as a delicate little one." 

The Virgin did not just speak that word then, but she continues to speak it and will speak it until the end of time. It is necessary to repeat it: we are Juan Diego. He is not only the poor, unfortunate individual who looked at the hill filled with light, who contemplated the heavenly face of Mary, who heard her maternal and most sweet word as music from the heavens. We are Juan Diego. He is four centuries [now five] old. He will live until the end of time. And to the immortal Juan Diego our Lady says, "My son whom I love tenderly as a delicate little one."

Do we feel the exquisite sweetness, the heavenly softness of that word of love? When our Lady came to our soul, when she took possession, so to speak, of our people - which is her people - when she adopted our race, the first word that sprang from her most sweet heart, we should not forget. It was a word of love: "My son whom I love."

The love of the Holy Virgin was not fleeting. It is not like the affections of our fickle hearts, which change, fade, and suffer eclipses. No, the love of the Virgin is like the love of God. What Mary loved she continues to love, and now that word has a pulsating and divine timeliness. If at this moment we were to hear with our mortal ears that the Blessed Virgin was saying to us from her throne, "My little children, whom I love tenderly as little and delicate ones," these words would have no greater reality, no greater force, no greater sweetness than those spoken four centuries ago. The divine conquers time because the divine is not subject to the changes of the centuries. And through the centuries we receive the loving word in the depths of our heart.

We have undoubtedly thought it in the depths of our souls. Mary loves us! She loves us like delicate little children! Can we dream of a greater happiness? Ah, let other peoples boast of the power of their armies, the abundance of their treasures, the splendor of their science, the immensity of their territory, and the glory of their history. For us, the Blessed Virgin's love is worth more than all that! When one by one the nations of the earth come to tell us the marks of their greatness and their glory, we could answer them: Ah, we have more, much more than you because we have the love of the Mother of God! On our coats of arms there is a word that is worth all the glories of the earth.

"My son whom I love tenderly as a little and delicate one."
Let us not think that Our Lady's love has withered over the centuries. Let us not believe that it has waned little by little because of our ingratitude and our miseries and sins. No, I am pleased to repeat that Mary's love is like the love of God, like a divine gift. It is never withdrawn. She loves us, and she loves us tenderly as little and delicate ones. 

+ + +

There is more, as there always is when we speak of love. But for now, let me wish you a very Merry and Happy Feast of Our Mother who loves us tenderly and like the little and delicate ones that we are! Marcel is a fan! Therese is a fan! And overall, we here at Miss Marcel's Musings can't get enough of the love of God which bends down to delight in us, the littlest ones of His awesome creation.

Draw me; we will run!!!