34 Am I Not Your Mother? hearts with love, and when love has triumphed, it is easy to flood souls with light. Then came the three centuries of Spanish rule: sweet, quiet, monotonous if you will, as childhood always is. A superficial examination would make the years appear slow as well as sterile. But in reality, our spirit was being formed under the protection of the Virgin Mary in silence and peace. The years of childhood, apparently useless, are the most fruitful and transcendental of life. In them, our mother’s deepest tenderness forges our heart in silence, and amidst warm caresses she lays the foundations of the future in our souls. This is what Our Lady of Guadalupe did with her people. She watched over themwith tender care in their childhood years and silently formed our strong faith, our sweet and sincere piety, our gentle and enthusiastic character. Little by little, the tilma was losing its native roughness, and the heavenly features of Mary were being etched more intensely, more profoundly, and more beautifully into our national soul. The sweet melody of Tepeyac seems in the last century to have broken because strange dissonances broke the unity of the innocent and sweet theme of Tepeyac in the symphony of our national life. Many will think this and will identify our Guadalupan hopes as illusions. They do not realize that love, without losing its divine
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