Fr. Josh, a priest I know, said once that he was praying to Mary because he needed help with patience and that was something obviously Mary knew well. It didn’t resonate with me at the time, but as I have found myself drawn closer to Our Lady of Guadalupe (essentially, the Mexican Mary) and on Thursday, December 12, I will celebrate my birthday on her feast day, I have awoken to what she is teaching me this year.
I have been writing recently that my job will end in late January and I’ve been busy trying to gain both traction and momentum as I await for new windows and doors to open. After all, I know well that if you want doors and windows to open, you need to work hard, too.
But in all of this, has been much frustration as I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels, taking more steps back than forward, and feeling a start-stop-start-stop with all that I do.
Then one day it occurred to me, maybe it was because yesterday is the celebrated Immaculate Conception, that Mary didn’t know why she was called on to be Jesus’s mother. And that’s when what Fr. Josh said to me several years ago about praying to Mary to learn patience better made sense.
I feel like I know what I’m supposed to be, to do. I feel that I am supposed to be more, to do bigger things. And yet here I stand with a gorge separating me from where I want to be. I ask and ask and ask to cross it (and I’ve recently decided that it’s a gulf and that maybe I should swim across it), but it’s still start-stop-start-stop.
Every year this time I feel closer to Guadalupe, I feel a stronger sense of meaning on my birthday, that the day is more than, well, my birthday. It’s a day– and time– that Guadalupe comes closer and brings me messages for the journey, while we also are in the thick of the waiting and magic of Advent.
Patience. The unknown. All the things I hate. And yet Guadalupe is saying, “It’s coming. I’m with you. Keep walking with me. This journey will make sense and you’ll get across that gulf. But not on your schedule. On God’s, on mine.”
Stay the course, I often tell myself, just as we did particularly when running cross country. Stay the course. It will come, it will happen. Patience. The lesson has to be learned first.