Flowers for the Immaculate Conception (It’s the ones who are tiny, edition)

Large flowers can be beautiful. For instance, my favorite next to the one-time hermitage above. But unable to hide in the undergrowth, they are vulnerable to the weather. A moment of untoward temperature change and they’re so dead. And there’s a danger in being “the tall poppy” as they say. These large wild flowers were attacked by a nefarious neighbor just over the ridge who hunted them down, killed all the plants, shredding the woody stems. These large flowers, with all their security features of size and armor, had nothing more to brag about. It wouldn’t happen to tiny flowers:

The tiny flowers, in their trillions, just keep doing what they’re supposed to do, with marauders accidentally stomping on them (they don’t care), with snow and sleet and frost and floods (they don’t care). In the worst of conditions, there they are. Their very humility is their defense.

Analogy: so many hidden saints among the laity and even some priests and a bishop or two, who despite adverse circumstances keep on believing as they should, not becoming cynical and bitter and fading away. They are just so tiny before the majesty of the Sacred Mysteries. Their very humility is their defense. Who can hurt them? They are with Jesus. He rose from the dead after the powerful showed their worst.

Meanwhile, this fact enrages malice, and it’s the humble, the believers who are hunted down. It’s the tiny ones, the vulnerable ones, who are sought after to destroy, the littlies in the wombs of their mothers, for instance. It’s the cowardly powerful who go after the weakest. And sometimes it’s even the large flowers who go after the small ones, taking away all the sunshine and water.

For the haughty and mighty in their own eyes, I think it’s a desire to show just how evil and mean they can be. That’s makes them look sophisticated, clever, able to rationalize being men of consensus. Untouchable, they think. But there is always someone more evil, more powerful. Taken Satan, for instance, whom they serve. Satan will turn on them before they know what’s going on.

And while Satan is busy making them twice the children of hell as before, the little one’s go on doing what they always do in doing God’s will.