The Story of Our Lady of Guadalupe

In December of 1531, just ten years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, an Indigenous man named Juan Diego was crossing Tepeyac hill outside Mexico City when, as he told it, a beautiful lady appeared to him. She spoke to him in his own language, Nahuatl, and told him she was the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God — and that she wanted a church built on that hill. The bishop asked for a sign. Juan Diego found roses blooming on the barren hilltop in the middle of winter, gathered them in his cloak — his tilma — and when he poured them out in front of the bishop, her image was found imprinted on the cloth.

That tilma is almost five hundred years old now, and it still hangs in the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City, one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the world. Tepeyac had earlier been a shrine to Tonantzin, an Aztec mother goddess, and that's part of why so many people see Guadalupe as a meeting of two worlds: a brown-skinned Virgin who spoke Nahuatl, and who stood, right from the beginning, with the conquered instead of the conquerors. She's the Patroness of Mexico and of the Americas, and her feast day is December 12.

In the Grove: roses in the middle of winter, and a mother who shows up for the humble. We keep her day with both worlds in mind — the way she seems to herself.