We like surprises. That’s why gifts are wrapped – an everyday sight during this season of surprises which is Christmas – to heighten the suspense of guessing what’s inside.
I come to my office this morning of 19 December and I am surprised, pleasantly naturally, by a number of gifts waiting at my table. The mysteriousness of their contents considerably diminishes as I settle on my chair and start to examine them. From So-and-so comes a box that could only mean either a shirt or an article of clothing. From another comes a non-surprise, an unwrapped bag of oatmeal cookies, a welcome treat for my atherosclerotic heart. From still another is a most curiously-shaped package, but when I read the donors’ greetings, the content becomes obvious, as I remember that a few days ago they asked me pointblank: “What do you want for Christmas, something that you can use?” and, in reply, so as not to prolong the tug-of-war of “I really do not need anything” “No, really, please tell us”, and so on, I said: “I could use a music stand, as my old one got ruined”, not without grumbling over the quality of “Made in China” wares.
A man was asked why he never noticed what his wife was wearing. (Don’t you, wives, wonder why your husbands hardly notice your clothes, except when he has to pay for them?). He answered: “When you know what’s the gift inside, you don’t care how it is wrapped”.
The degree with which we wonder at gifts depends on our experience or expectations. And our expectations in turn can depend on the image that we have of the gift giver.
The preacher of today’s (December 19) Simbang Gabi, Fr. Diony Selma, prior of the Recollect religious community of San Sebastian and veep for administration of the college, invited us to look into our image of God and check whether it is more mature as compared to that which we had as children. How do we envision God? This is very important, for from this vision we have of God derives our behavior towards him.
If we envision God as a heavenly policeman constantly keeping a tab on humanity’s behavior, – it’s hard not to think also of the capriciousness and venality of some of our policemen – then we “better watch out” because “he is making a list, and checking it twice, he’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice”. Those who make the grade are going to get the reward.
If we think of God as an astute businessman, then our concern will be to make sure we have the right amount of currency to buy his goodies. Our prayers will have to be sufficiently intense and continuous, our behavior will have to pass quality control, our life will have to be in such a way that, in exchange, he will give us his blessings and grant our petitions. Obviously, if he does not, then we cry “unfair”.
If we envision God as a slavemaster we will be in constant pressure thinking whether we are up to the task. We will feel the need to pile up works of charity, acts of self-abnegation, accumulation of merits to offer on the altar of the stern Master.
Two thousand years after the first Christmas, we know, or we think we know, what’s inside God’s Gift. The Gift was pre-announced – prefigured is how Bible scholars would put it – by sons born of old and sterile wives of skeptical husbands (Think Samson and John the Baptist). The Gift-carrier is a virgin who is at once a mother. The Gift is to be found, not under an evergreen adorned with balls and lights and tinsel, but inside a trough for feeding lowly farm animals; and It is wrapped, not in bright colored silver wrapper or in the more modern and imaginative (and more costly) paper bags, but in “swaddling clothes”. It is not warmed by the heat of the open fire on which chestnuts are roasting, but is exposed to the inclemency of a Mediterranean winter. All these are supposed to awaken our sense of wonder at the extent of God’s love for mankind, but we know that story already, don’t we, can’t we just have, for a gift, a Wii or the latest Play Station, or a 3G cellphone, even if it were “Made in China”?
God’s gift is a Savior, not an object of entertainment or utilization. Our Savior Jesus showed us a God of suprises. Contrary to respectable people’s expectations, he does not search the company of the healthy and the righteous, but that of society’s rejects: the poor, the insignificant, the sinner, the sick and impure. He is not impressed by the huge amounts the rich put into the temple’s coffers, – for after all, those are only actually small change, merely the tip of their fiscal iceberg –, he notices the widow’s two mites, which were all she possessed, and which she gave from an abundant heart. He is not awed by the knowledge of the intelligentsia; as a mere child at the Temple he had already amazed them with his wisdom, and as an adult he had praised his Father for revealing to merest children what he hid from the learned.
Growing in our knowledge of this Gift of God makes us aware that God is really a God of surprises. But the motif that runs through all his surprises is certain: his infinite love for mankind. He is passionate about mankind.
If he clothes the lilies of the fields and feeds the sparrows of the air, what won’t he do for his people? We are the pupil of his eyes (Deut 32:10; Ps 17:8; Prov 7:2; Zech 2:8; the familiar expression today is “the apple of the eye”). Now the eye is an extremely sensitive part of the body. God will protect his people as he protects his eye. In other words, to mess with God’s people is like poking a stick in God’s eye, so watch out!
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The Pupil of Her EyesSome days ago, during the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (12 December) I asked Sir Rod Ponce what he knew about the investigations on the pupil of the eyes of the image of Our Lady. He said he knew more or less about the story of the apparitions but that was the first time he heard about the eyes. Must be because he did not have Mexican contemporaries in the seminary, which I had.
Our Mexican confreres, when we were studying theology in Spain, during the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas (and secondary Patroness of the Philippines), would serenade us with
rancheros, serve us
tacos, guacamole and shots of
tequila, and update us with exhibits of the image of the brown Madonna. I remember there was a gigantic closeup of the right eye of the image.
Like Sir Rod, the reader will probably know the general story about the image of our Lady of Guadalupe.
On 9 December 1531 the Blessed Virgin appeared to a poor peasant named Juan Diego on Tepeyac hill, near the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City). Identifying herself as the Mother of the True God, Mary asked him to relay to the local bishop her request that a church be built on the hill. Juan Diego found it hard to get an audience from Bishop Zumárraga let alone make him believe the apparition. Mary, at her next appearance, told him to reiterate the appeal. On her third apparition, Juan Diego told her the bishop wanted some proof it was really her.
On 12 December, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego for the fourth and last time. He had attempted to avoid her as he had to hurry to find a priest to minister to his dying uncle. The Blessed Virgin appeared to him anyway and told him not to worry; that his uncle would be cured.
She said to him: “Listen and let it penetrate your heart, my dear little son. Do not be troubled or weighed down with grief. Do not fear any illness or vexation, anxiety, or pain. Am I not here who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not your fountain of life? Are you not in the folds of my mantle? In the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else you need? Do not let the sickness of your uncle worry you because he is not going to die of his sickness. At this very moment, he is cured.”
As for the sign that the bishop requested, the Blessed Virgin told Juan Diego to pick some Castilian roses that were growing nearby. It being winter, the presence of roses was unheard of. Juan Diego placed them on his
tilma, a sort of poncho made out of coarse cactus cloth, and he marched into town.
A bigger wonder awaited the bishop and everyone with him when Juan Diego opened his
tilma. For aside from the cascading roses, what brought the bishop to his knees was the sight of the image of the Blessed Virgin appearing on the
tilma!
It is a wonder that the
tilma, a fabric made from cactus, which ordinarily disintegrates after 50 years, has survived till today, 476 years later. That it has withstood the exposure to inclement weather (damage of a 1629 flood is apparent at the edges of the tilma) and to the caresses of millions of pilgrims (shrine guardians of pilgrimage sites only know too well the obsession of many a devotee to possess a piece of relic!), and even to the bombs of an anticlerical government who wanted to have the image destroyed.
It is a wonder that to this day, no one can explain how such a fine image could be imprinted on such a rough surface. In May 1979, studying the image by infra-red photography, Philip C. Callahan, research biophysicist at the University of Florida, ruled out brush strokes, over-painting, varnish, sizing, or even preliminary drawings by an artist on the body of the image. He concluded that the original image on the
tilma has qualities of color and uses the weave of the cloth in such a way that the image could not be the work of human hands.
It is a wonder that in the years following the apparitions, almost the entire population of Aztecs and Mayans were converted to Christianity. Considering the differences between the two cultures and the utter novelty of the Christian religion, such massive-scale conversion is very difficult to explain.
It is a wonder that as science progresses, instead of being able to expose the image as a hoax that some people allege it is, science is in fact discovering more astounding things about it.
Let me cut-and-paste extensively from another internet site (you can also google “Our Lady of Guadalupe” and restrict your search to “pupil” to find the images):
“In 1929, Alfonso Marcue, who was the official photographer of the old Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City, found what seemed to him to be a clear image of a bearded man reflected in the right eye of the Virgin. Initially he did not believe what was before his eyes. How could it be? A bearded man inside of the eyes of the Virgin? After many inspections of many of his black and white photographs he had no doubts and decided to inform the authorities of the Basilica. He was told that time to keep complete silence about the discovery, which he did. More than 20 years later, on May 29, 1951, Jose Carlos Salinas Chavez, examining a good photograph of the face, rediscovers the image of what clearly appears to be a bearded man reflected in the right eye of the Virgin, and locates it on the left eye too.
Since then, many people had the opportunity to inspect closely the eyes of the Virgin on the tilma, including more than 20 physicians, ophthalmologists. The first one, on March 27, 1956, was Dr. Javier Torroella Bueno, MDS, a prestigious ophthalmologist. In what is the first report on the eyes of the image issued by a physician, he certifies what seems to be the presence of the triple reflection (Samson-Purkinje effect) characteristic of all live human eyes and states that the resulting images are located exactly where they are supossed to be according to such effect, and also that the distortion of the images agree with the curvature of the cornea. The same year another ophthalmologist, Dr. Rafael Torrija Lavoignet, examined the eyes of the image with an ophthalmoscope in great detail. He observed the apparent human figure in the corneas of both eyes, with the location and distortion of a normal human eye and specially noted a unique appearance of the eyes: they look strangely "alive" when examined. Many other examinations by ophthalmologists have been done of the eyes of the image on the tilma after these first ones. With more or less details all agree with the conclusions of the ones mentioned above.
A new and interesting kind of analysis of the eyes started in 1979, when Dr. Jose Aste Tonsmann, Ph D, graduated from Cornell University, while working in IBM scanned at very high resolutions a very good photograph, taken from the original, of the face on the tilma. After filtering and processing the digitized images of the eyes to eliminate "noise" and enhance them, he reports he made some astonishing discoveries: not only the "human bust" was clearly present in both eyes, but other human figures were seen as reflected in the eyes too. Dr. Aste Tonsmann published his last studies on the eyes on the tilma in the book "El Secreto de sus Ojos", with complete details and photographs of his work. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the studies is his conclusion that Our Lady of Guadalupe not only left us her miraculous image as proof of her apparition but some important messages too. These messages were hidden in the eyes on the image until our times, when new technologies would allow them to be discovered, when they are most necessary.
That would be the case with the image of a family in the center of the Virgin's eye, in times when families are under serious attack in our modern world. The image of various human figures that seem to constitute a family, including various children and a baby carried in the woman's back as used in the 16th century, appears in the center of the pupil, as shown in the great image of the right eye highlighting the family, generously provided by Dr. Tonsmann” (
http://www.sancta.org/eyes.html)
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On Friday, 21 December, I will be concelebrating and delivering the homily at the wedding of my good friend Astrid Joanna Advincula and Raoul Ramon Veroy. I will tell the young couple that they, like all of mankind, are the pupil of God’s eyes. And that the family is the pupil of Our Lady’s eyes. I will reiterate to them Our Lady’s comforting words: “Do not fear any illness or vexation, anxiety, or pain. Am I not here who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not your fountain of life? Are you not in the folds of my mantle? In the crossing of my arms?” And Mary could very well have added: “Are you not the pupil of my eyes?”
Do you know where Joanna is getting married? Surprise, surprise: in Guadalupe, Makati, at the church of Nuestra Señora de Gracia.
My wish for everyone this Christmas is that we regain fully our sense of wonder at being the pupil of both God's and Mary's eyes.
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Other useful links:
http://www.holyhillcross.com/EYES%20OF%20OUR%20LADY.htmhttp://www.medjugorje-online.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=56810&sid=f80f1f6bd7f1c128c42d1be496899705http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=133791 (In this Catholic forum, there are answers to skeptics Nickell’s view, presented in
http://www.csicop.org/sb/2002-06/guadalupe.html).
