Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and I thought I’d share my thoughts because it is a miracle that has particular significance to me. It’s not that I’m Mexican or have any attachment to the area: rather, these Marian apparitions were the first miracle of private revelation that was explained to me after I’d decided to convert to Catholicism.

When I decided that I needed to abandon Protestantism for Catholicism, I set up a meeting with a Catholic priest to discuss my situation. In his office, he had framed a portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which I thought rather curious. When I expressed my curiosity, that is when he told me the story.

Our Lady of Guadalupe first appeared to a young boy, Juan Diego, atop a hill in Mexico where she instructed him to erect a chapel there in her honour. Juan told this to the Archbishop, who dismissed his story, and when Our Lady appeared to Juan again, she told him to insist. When Juan went back to the Archbishop, this time he was told to ask the woman to prove her identity. Juan asked Our Lady for proof, which she agreed to provide the next day on December 12. Juan was supposed to meet her atop the hill, but was led astray by the obligations to his deathly sick uncle, who seemed to be about ready to take his final bow, and was in need of a priest. While searching for a priest, Juan was intercepted by Our Lady, who told him that his uncle would recover, and to go atop the hill, and pick roses. Castilian roses do not usually grow at that time of year, nor even in that area, but at the top of the hill, there they were, and Our Lady arranged a bundle of them for Juan Diego to carry in his tilma (i.e., cloak). Juan took these roses to the Archbishop, he let go of his tilma, and the roses fell, revealing an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the likeness of which was found in Father’s office. The next day, Juan Diego found his uncle had recovered, and his uncle told him that he had seen Our Lady prayed for him next to his bedside. The two testimonies and the miraculous image prompted the Archbishop to believe Juan Diego, and a chapel dedicated to Our Lady was erected on Tepeyac Hill.

Juan Diego’s tilma has survived the erosion brought on by time, which has given us a chance to examine it, and as it turns out, there are a number of interesting things about it. Besides its incredible longevity, there is the fact that the colours did not penetrate the fibres of the tilma as paint would do, and the roughness of the material should have distorted the image, yet it remained clear. Moreover, the Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, Richard Kuhn, found that there were no natural or mineral colourings in the image, however there was no synthetic colourings available at the time. It would seem that the image was not painted. In fact, it is inexplicable.

In fact, this image is so clear that those who’ve studied it have been able to make out what seems to be the images of onlookers in Our Lady’s eyes. The eyes were examined by ophthalmologists, who found that the distortions and locations of these images were what one would expect in an eye. One such ophthalmologist even went as far as to say that the eyes looked “strangely alive”. Apparently, her eyes displayed the three effects of image refraction in human eyes. Of course, there were other ophthalmologists who’ve disagreed with their conclusions, of course, as even faithful Catholics are permitted to do (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 67). Nevertheless, what this story of Our Lady of Guadalupe showed me was not certitude per se, but that miracles were possible and could still happen.

There is a theological position espoused by some called cessationism, which holds that God ceased (hence the name) to impart spiritual gifts and abilities (such as miracles) to the Church in the Apostolic age or shortly thereafter. It’s a tempting doctrine, not least because it allows its proponents to dismiss miraculous claims on a whim, but also because permits them to see miracles as something of the distant past: those who hold to cessationism are free to remain strong materialists about the present, thereby disabusing them of having to think critically about the many ways in which the Lord is working in our world today.

How often is it that Biblical figures are confronted by Heavenly things, and are told not to be afraid? Quite often. In this same way, perhaps I was afraid myself. Before I had heard of Guadalupe, I would have probably thought myself as something of a cessationist. It was far easier to be sceptical about miracles than to accept that they might still happen than to admit that God still makes himself known to us in miraculous ways. Miracles are shocking to us since they fly in the face of how we generally make sense of the world, but for God, as the Creator, it is within His power to observe the natural flow of events from beyond time just as well as it is within his power to act on them from the same place.

It was Our Lady of Guadalupe that proved this to me, and shook my faith that there were no longer any miracles. I realised that God can be and is still active in the world in more than a providential way. The miraculous works of God did not simply disappear or become an impossibility; and as well as the miraculous apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe, being set free from this erroneous way of thinking is what I am celebrating today.