"Muscuchar"

In our lab, sometimes when niños are being tested in their nondominant language, they make up words.  Sometimes they make up entire sentences out of nonsense syllables; this is always fun.  But occasionally there's a stroke of brilliance.  One of the niños in our lab used the verb "muscuchar", which didn't make sense in context, but I decided it's too good to pass up.  I hereby declare that "muscuchar" is a combination of the words "música" (music) and "escuchar" (to listen), and it means "to listen to music."  Update your Spanish dictionaries, people, this is going to be big.

Relatedly, today is the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, so my church is having a HUGE celebration.  My youth group is singing a few maricachi-esque songs to our lovely mother, and I am playing the violin!  The last nine days we've been saying a novena and singing lots of awesome Mary songs and people have even been doing traditional Native dances after Mass (Matachines).  I haven't been able to go most days (finals....), but when I have been able to, it's been really fun!  And yesterday (today too I think) a bunch of the Jovenes put on a play about Juan Diego, the Native Mexican guy who Mary gave the visions to—it was the perfect mixture of respectful and also silly (my friends playing the Bishop and his lackeys were pretty funny).  I love my parish; we don't take ourselves too seriously but we DO take God very seriously!

Latin America has a special devotion to Mary; in large part this is because she was the one who evangelized them and brought them to Jesus.  She has appeared miraculously many times in different places, and her Guadalupan vision is one of the most famous ones.  I actually got to see the cloth with her image on it when I went to Mexico as a senior in highschool.  It hasn't biodegraded even after all these years—and scientists can't find any paintbrush marks on it either, apparently.  Yesterday, the priest was talking about some photographers who found that Mary's eyes had a reflection of someone in them and that the photographs of her eyes looked like live eyes.  I'm not super well versed on the miracles associated with this image of Mary, but I do know that it was because of that vision that many Native Mexicans learned about Jesus.  (Let's face it; the conquistadors did a horrible job at evangelizing!)  So it's a bit deal for Mexican Catholics, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

We are praising God for His great love for us—that He was born of a poor peasant woman so He could die for us and earn us passage into Heaven.  And of course we are saying thank-you to Maria for showing us Jesus, who is the most important Person in our lives.

I'm sure Mama Maria is muscuchando to her children today—and I hope we are making her smile!