Why Do We Give Flowers to Our Mother?
Flowers are associated with Our Lady for many good reasons. One of nature’s most familiar manifestations of life and beauty, flowers are used in every culture in decoration and as gifts, a sign of love for any occasion. They have also sparked cultural imagination, collecting a wide variety of symbolic meanings; one can easily look up lists of flowers and the virtues, ideas, etc. they have been used to signify. The most familiar examples include lilies for purity and red roses for love.
Floral Imagery
All these reasons make flowers most fitting for the Queen of Heaven and Mother of all. Those seeking to express her perfect beauty and goodness have called her “Mystical Rose”; in the words of St. John Henry Newman, “She is the Queen of spiritual flowers.” This floral imagery has an especially strong connection with Our Lady of Guadalupe, because of the miraculous flowers on Tepeyac Hill. This sign was especially effective because, in native Mexican culture, flowers were “symbols of truth—more specifically the truth that, though somehow intuited by reason, is never comprehensively grasped.”
Purpose of the Gift
Her devoted children show their reverence and affection with flowers, lovingly placed at her shrines everywhere. Like ordinary gifts of flowers, those presented to Our Lady can express many sentiments, including gratitude, trust, a plea for help, or simply childlike love.
Mary Clare Kelly, Monthly Giving Manager at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, has twice experienced her Mother’s closeness through this gift of flowers. The first instance was on her first day of work at the Shrine, when she brought a bouquet “as a sign of this new chapter,” she says, “just bringing her everything … entrusting this new chapter to her and in gratitude.” The second instance was on her birthday. “I brought her a beautiful single stem rose,” she recalls. “I wanted to symbolize the gift of my life back to her and say thank you.”
Giving Flowers to Our Mother
Reflecting on what the practice means to her, Mary Clare observes that a tangible gesture like bringing flowers can help bring home the concrete reality of one’s relationship with Christ and His Mother. “What mother is not so touched when her children bring her flowers?” she says. “What a way to be her children and to practice that … It makes that relationship more real.”
The Little Way Flower Shop
Pilgrims to Our Lady’s Shrine who wish to bring a gift of flowers can purchase arrangements at the Pilgrim Center. Mary Therese Gaughan, the Shrine Florist, takes joy in seeing pilgrims bringing her work to Our Lady. “I make the arrangements with the hope that it will delight Our Lady’s heart. It’s all for Mary,” she says.
Often these simple gifts are expressions of faith from hearts in need. “Many pilgrims come here to the Shrine with something on their hearts,” says Mary Therese, “asking Our Lady for something, maybe even a miracle. Bringing flowers to her is basically saying, I trust you, I believe in impossible things. That trust delights her heart as much as the flowers presented to her do.”
Flowers on Tepeyac
In the context of Our Lady of Guadalupe, she recalls, flowers are a reminder of our Mother’s miraculous power and care, as she brought an impossible blooming from the desert soil in December. The concrete practice of presenting flowers to Our Lady can help bring these truths before one’s mind and heart; as Mary Therese says, “I hope the pilgrims’ devotion and faith are strengthened through something as simple as bringing Mary flowers, trusting that she will help arrange all their cares and concerns with the same tenderness with which she arranged the flowers in St. Juan Diego’s tilma.”
Nor is it necessary to go out on pilgrimage to a shrine or church to practice this devotion. Each household is a domestic church (CCC 1655–56, 1666), where devotional life begins. Those who find consolation in presenting flowers to their Mother can do so at their own home altar or prayer corner. St. Thérèse of Lisieux describes how, as a small child, she enjoyed decorating a little homemade Marian shrine where she could practice her own May devotions (Story of a Soul, ch. II).
Roses for Our Lady
In addition, anyone can give a rose to Our Lady at the Shrine, even if unable to come in person. Twice a year, on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the anniversary of the Shrine Church’s dedication, all are invited to contribute through the Shrine’s website to place a rose or a dozen roses in the church in our Mother’s honor. In past collections, the generosity of many has filled the church with well over a thousand roses.
“Consider the lilies of the field … I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (Mt 6:28–29). With all their many forms of loveliness, flowers are indeed fittingly used to convey all sorts of spiritual beauty. As in Mary Clare’s example, the offering of a flower can even represent the gift of one’s whole heart and life. After all, human beings, like flowers, come from the earth yet stretch toward the light of the heavens.
