Symbols: When Earth Meets Heaven

As we begin our mission, Sr. Danielle Victoria insisted that we choose a symbol to represent what the Lord has been revealing to us about our mission and charism as Sisters of the Little Way of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.

“You mean a logo?” said Sr. Theresa Aletheia skeptically.

“A symbol,” Sr. Danielle Victoria repeated. 

Romano Guardini wrote in The Spirit of the Liturgy, “A symbol [originates when] that which is interior and spiritual finds expression in that which is exterior and material.” Symbol originates, for Guardini, in the human soul as expressed through one’s body. He links this reality of our embodied souls to the liturgy, which Benedict XVI describes as “symbolic action.” In other words, by uniting us both in spirit and flesh, our embodied souls find our deepest meaning in liturgy.

Of course, choosing a symbol for a charism is not the same as the symbolic action of Liturgy but in some ways it’s a liturgical action. By choosing a symbol, we recognize that charisms are not Gnostic knowledge that drop from the sky. Because God works incarnationally, the charisms of the Holy Spirit meet real time, real places, and real humans, or embodied souls. 

We are fundamentally symbolic beings but the deeper meaning of symbols, including our very embodied souls, can be emptied of meaning. This is particularly true in a fast moving digital world. Marshall McLuhan's idea that “the medium is the message” helps us to understand that the medium of a message, or how it is communicated, is often more formative than the message itself.

The danger in this is that good and true messages can be emptied of their meaning if they are communicated in ways that degrade them. The same is true for symbols. Symbols often are degraded in modern branding and in the design of logos because they are communicated or used in ways that manipulate our desires rather than lifting them toward higher things. 

With all this in mind, we did not want to cheapen our charism in any way by choosing a material design that did not adequately capture spiritual realities. And while no symbol is going to capture exactly what God is doing in our mission and in our lives, we believe it’s important to try, especially in a digital world in which so much is communicated nonverbally.

We are grateful to Daniela Madriz de Quintana who did a great job listening to us and translating the fundamental inspirations around our mission into a clean design that encapsulates the unity and simplicity of what we believe the Lord is inspiring through our mission.

Our symbol has three elements: 

A five-petaled wild rose

Three dots 

A teal circle

One continuous line forms the five petals of the wild rose, communicating a theme of unity and renewal. The symbol of a rose points to the concrete place where we began as a private association—Portland, OR, known as The City of Roses. The symbol of the rose also pays homage to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the patroness of the Sisters of the Little Way who promised, “I will send down a shower of roses from the heavens; I will spend my heaven doing good upon earth.” 

Wild roses have five petals that have traditionally been understood to represent the five joys of Mary and the five wounds of Christ. Our mission springs from the wounds in the Body of Christ caused by our sin and the joy of Mary who trusts in the power of God to bring about healing and renewal. The Latin noun vulnus or "wound" gives us the world “vulnerable.” As Sisters of the Little Way, our mission is to profoundly live the Gospel option for the vulnerable and the wounded. As Pope Francis tells us, “Jesus’ followers recognize themselves by their closeness to the poor, the little ones, the sick and the imprisoned, the excluded and the forgotten, those without food and clothing.” 

The three dots at the center of the rose represent the three persons of the Trinity and the glory of God, revealed to us through the transcendentals of beauty, truth, and goodness. 

The teal circle represents the blue of the sky mixing with the green of the earth or our littleness meeting God’s unity, power, and greatness. The color teal, also the color of our veil, is sampled from the tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the New Evangelization and the Americas. The color of earth meeting heaven, teal is the color of healing; it also represents the intercession of Mary, who in presenting our intentions to her Son makes all things most beautiful. 

The intermingling of cool blues with a touch of warm yellow in the color teal invites us to a spirit of what one might call “bright sadness.” The Greek noun charmolypê is translated as “bitter joy” or “joyful mourning” and is sometimes referred to as “bright sadness” in the Orthodox tradition. The Fathers of the Church refer to these kinds of realities as an “antinomy,” a paradoxical truth that defies normal logic. This paradoxical state is one in which many on the fringes of the Church find themselves and it underlies and inspires our mission of evangelization and healing.

The mingling of joy and grief, commonly expressed in Eastern iconography, also has deeply inspired Sr. Danielle Victoria’s art. These paradoxical truths of the faith help us to see that true joy is not a “shiny” holiness or a superficial happiness. Rather, bright sadness relies on an abiding relationship with the living God who alone gives us courage amid darkness so that we may embrace the radiant light of renewal in the Church.