Our Lady of Guadalupe

The Christian distinction between God and the world emphasizes God's radical otherness from the cosmos.  God is not part of the world, nor is He non-existent.  He is certainly no thing but He is not nothing.  Robert Sokolowski contrasts the Christian view of God and the cosmos with pagan and atheistic worldviews.  For atheists God is nowhere, non-existent.  For pagans the world contains the gods.  Christians believe there is one (triune) God, and He is so transcendent to the whole that He is not subject to the necessities of the whole.  He created them!  In fact, the whole was created by God out of love, out of generosity (gene + eros).  God would be as perfect without having created, but He did so.  And God's transcendence is so radical that he could enter (through Jesus Christ) into his creation through Incarnation, and redeem it.  Creation, Incarnation, Redemption:  All made possible by the nature of the true God, radically distinct from, but close to, the world. See Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason and Eucharistic Presence.

The Christian distinction makes all the difference in understanding and living Christian faith, according to Sokolowski.  The Christian distinction, given through revelation [man could not discern the distinction by himself] allows man to enter into God's plan of redemption and his redemptive acts.  The sacraments and sacraments are the church's ways of living the distinction:  they allow us to enter into Christ's redemptive life.

The feast yesterday of Our Lady of Guadalupe strikes me as a wonderful example of the Christian distinction revealed.  The Gospel reading from Luke (concerning the Annunciation) emphasizes (in Gabriel's words) that "with God nothing will be impossible."  That is, God is not subject to the powers and principalities, the normal necessities of the physical world.

Our lady appeared in 1531 to Juan Diego on the Feast of the Annunciation to reveal this God to present day Mexicans who were drowning in pagan religion.  They worshipped the sun and moon and practiced human sacrifice.  Mary appeared standing on the moon, and, in the words of Revelation 12:1, "clothed in the sun", her feet crushing the serpent of Revelation.  See Wikipedia article and excerpt below.  She told Juan Diego, "I am the . . . Mother of the True God through whom everything lives, the Lord and Master of all things near and far, the Master of Heaven and Earth." The Word Among Us, December 2012, Meditation at p. 38.

The entire experience of the appearance points to Christ as the true God, beyond the cosmos and above the false gods of Mexico, with Mary saying to the people of Mexico (and of all the world), "Worship the true God, not false gods."

Here is a paragraph from the Wikipedia article:

The iconography of the Virgin is impeccably Catholic:^[29] Miguel Sanchez, the author of the 1648 tract Imagen de la Virgen María, described her as the Woman of the Apocalypse from the New Testament's Revelation 12:1, "clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars,"^[22][30] and she is also described as a representation of the Immaculate Conception.^[22] Yet despite this orthodoxy the image also had a hidden layer of coded messages for the indigenous people of Mexico which goes a considerable way towards explaining her popularity.^[31] Her blue-green mantle was the color reserved for the divine couple Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl;^[32] her belt is interpreted as a sign of pregnancy; and a cross-shaped image symbolizing the cosmos and called nahui-ollin is inscribed beneath the image's sash.^[33] She was called "mother of maguey,"^[34] the source of the sacred beverage pulque,^[35] "the milk of the Virgin",^[36] and the rays of light surrounding her doubled as maguey spines.^[34]

The Christian distinction invites us to enter into the space opened by God's revelation of Himself through His actions in history.  We are invited to enter into a sacramental life: to see our lives profiled against and made meaningful by the salvation history that God and his son Jesus Christ have mercifully enacted.  The church's seven sacraments exist precisely to help us to "imitate Christ" and thereby to participate with Him in the world's continuing suffering unto redemption.   For the many in a world lacking meaning, the invitation can be a life-saving grace.