Our Lady's Lamp

Today (December 12) is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. For an abbreviated version of the story, go here . Most of us are familiar with the image. Some of us - myself included until recently - tend to avoid this aspect of Mary because she's so.... popular. And for those of us who are not Mexican, we often get weird looks from people when we start talking about Our Lady of Guadalupe because, well, she's Mexico's Lady, right? Wrong! I could spend forever talking about all the amazing aspects of this apparition. I could talk about the fact that the tilma has survived for over 400 years when it shouldn't last beyond 20 (And the first 100 or so were unprotected). I could talk about the images present in her 3 mm eyes; I could talk about the lack of brush strokes on the tilma, the fact that scientists just scratch their heads in confusion as they try to explain it, about how the stars on her mantle align with the constellations on the day she first appeared, or about h...

Typology is something I am going to be using in many of my posts, so I am going to type this up once and link it whenever I use it. What is Typology? Mister Webster defines it thusly:  "A doctrine of theological types; especially: one holding that things in Christian belief are prefigured or symbolized by things in the Old Testament." St. Augustine talks about this mystery when He says, "The New Testament is concealed in the old, and the Old is revealed in the New." Michael Barber (in his book,  Coming Soon, Unlocking the Book of Revelation and Applying its Lessons Today ) describes typology this way, "God is the Author of all history, which He fashioned for the salvation of the world. When humans write books, we use words to signify realities.... God "writes" the world as men write books - except, instead of using only words, He can use historical realities to signify other historical realities. "An example is the Passover. Th...

In class today, the teacher, Mrs. D, made a comparison that I'd never thought of before. God communicates to us like the old pen pals did. Back in the time of the World Wars, many people wrote long letters to each other, and they fell in love even across the sea. Through these letters, they poured their hearts out and decided that, yes, they were willing to spend their lives together based solely on this interaction. They never met each other, they didn't have several friends in common who could vouch for them, they accepted the words on the pages, and they married.  In many ways, that is how God communicates with us. He gives us glimpses of himself, most especially in the Scriptures and creation. He writes His love for us through the pages and trees. These letters tell us who He is, give us little anecdotes to see His personality, and tell us how serious He is about our relationship. He pours His Heart out upon these pages, begging us to recognize this love and sincerity....