In Praise of Little Things

Daniel Mitsui, who is both an extraordinary artist and theologian, offers a poignant collection of thoughts this Holy Week regarding Little Things. After an edict in Japan outlawed Christianity,

The Kakure Kirishitan - the "hidden Christians" of Japan - were able to practice a crypto-Christianity disguised as Buddhism; they attended the temples like their neighbors, but secretly fasted from meat on Fridays and gathered to pray the Rosary. They had no priests, and thus no Mass, but they baptized children in celebrations disguised as birthday parties. They kept statues of Buddhist saints that resembled Christian ones, and collected rocks whose shapes suggested the Virgin Mary. Some communities guarded the small catechisms and devotional books that the missionaries had disseminated, but most relied on memorized, orally transmitted prayers in garbled Latin. Some families kept pious trinkets that the missionaries had given their ancestors - medals not much different from those now sold in Catholic bookstores for 25 cents each. The Kakure Kirishitan hid these in their homes and handed them down through the generations.

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Amid the destruction of so many ecclesiastical traditions since Vatican II, few have reflected that even the littlest of these "little" traditions might have been necessary to sustain the faith through centuries of persecution in a dark future. Any hymn that is discarded, any statue destroyed, any devotion discontinued, any note or syllable or image or gesture forgotten might one day have needed to be "enough". And now it has been lost; it will not be there - and not because Catholics since Vatican II have had samurai swords at their necks. This iconoclasm was motivated not by the zeal of a false religion, but, as Martin Mosebach wrote, by angst and pusillanimity. They threw away more than the Kakure Kirishitan ever had - because their souls were far too small for such "little" things.

I would never dare to tell a man who had risked torture and death for himself and for his family to keep a saint's medal buried in his house; who had gathered in conspiracy to exhume and venerate it; whose ancestors had passed it on as a terrible secret for ten generations, that it is a trivial or unnecessary thing. The "mature Christian" who has sneered at such "little t" traditions will stand face to face with that man on the Day of Judgment, and Saint Michael will weigh them in his scales.

Important words. Yes -- "maturity of the faith." But we human beings sometimes need the "little things" because we ARE little things in a vast universe. And in times of persecution, little things may be the ONLY things we have to cling to, until better times -- or Our Lord and His Good Lady -- return.