The above given title is the formulation of the charism of Little Flower Congregation. Hence, it is central to our spirituality and self-understanding. Jesus is the God of the little ones, of small things. The realities that are intimately related to his life, such as crib, cross, the Kingdom of God, etc., bespeak that Jesus is the God of the little ones. The little ones are all those who are on the periphery. They are the poor, the lowly, the oppressed, the illiterate, the excluded, the last, the least, the lost ones. Jesus was born on the periphery; carried out his mission on his periphery and among those in the periphery and finally died on the periphery. The good news of Jesus is the birth of a new hope in the hearts of millions who live on the periphery; the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed (Lk: 4:18). He belonged to a carpenter family, part of the lower middle class. Until he was thirty years old he worked as a rural youth in the carpenter’s workshop and earned his livelihood. He got involved in all the daily affairs of his village. His life and ministry were for the most part in Palestine. He spent most of his time in Galilee. most of his activities were centered in Caphernam, activities that were limited to ten kilometer’s diameter. He does not go to the city centers at all. We see no important city mentioned in the gospels. Instead we come across the rural places such as Nazareth, Bethsaida, Caphernam. The sphere of Jesus was the world of the small peasants, dispossessed of their good lands by Roman colonization and pushed to the rocky soil on hillsides. It was a world of the poor, the excluded and the unemployed. Jesus is the God of the little ones. He was born in a stable amidst poverty, privation and discomfort. He identified himself with the lowly in his ministry and finally died on the cross as wholly poor and outcast.

Now let us see the persons whom he elected and called. Four of them were fishermen, one was a tax collector; another one was a zealous of member of an outlawed group. Thus his disciples were poor and humble. Further we see that the language of Jesus was the language of the little ones. His parables refer to the humble realities of daily life of ordinary man; sowing and fishing, cooking and stitching, salt and leaven, sheep and goats, fig trees and vineyards. They reflect the life of the daily wage earners, of poor women and children. His parables came from the sphere of the ordinary people. They have come up from the life contact of the farmers and ordinary people in Galilee. He is the Messiah of the poor, one who perceives the advent of God in the simple and humble lives of the insignificant ones.

The charism of the Little Flower Congregation is, ‘be little, serve the little’. We have to search out the meaning of this word little first of all from the Bible, from the life and ministry of Jesus, from the life and teaching of Little Flower, from the God experience of our founder and from the interpretation of the contemporary socio-religious and cultural reality. Today more than ever the Church is called to follow Jesus by being present among this insignificant people, God’s little ones. Today the corporate greed has pushed in its agenda. They are left out, ignored and simply forgotten. The language of the market and the media is not the language of the poor and little ones.

Little Flower wanted to associate herself with everything that is little, that is why she called herself Little Flower, little bird, little queen, little soul, etc. There is invitation in the bible to become a child. In bible child is the symbol of the little ones and the marginalized. According to the Gospel a perfect disciple is a perfect child. For her these little ones were Franzini for whose conversion she prayed, Sr. St. Peter the aged and sick sister of her community, the sisters who were neglected by others in her convent, her missionary brethren and sinners all over the world. She loved them all, prayed for them all, she took up all her sufferings for them; she saw the whole world in and through them. When we say that our apostolate and ministry are in the rural domain, its basis is the gospel, the life and example of Jesus. It is there that we meet the little ones. Our founder saw the little ones in the orphans, in the poor villages of Mookkannur in the disorganized and illiterate farmers in the villages of Kerala. When we say that the charism of the Little Flower Congregation is related to villages and villagers, we are putting it concretely. It is the same as to saying that our charism is to be little and serve the little, it is above all a call to be little by personal, transformation, and then to take the side of the poor, lowly and little ones in the world and society, thus the words little and littleness are central to our self- understanding.

The Institute envisages an integral formation of the Seminarians to become the models of Christ who is teacher, priest and pastor (OT 4). The philosophical training is meant to help the students acquire, through various academic engagements and disciplinary activities, the ability to reflect over matters of intimate human concern with certitude and also to help them move towards the goal of attaining a discursive and intuitive apperception of Reality in its coherent dimensions of Man, Nature and the Ultimate.

As such the entire philosophical programme of this institute is oriented towards the intellectual and experiential realization of this holistic vision of Reality. Transcending a deceptively contradictory world and worldview is necessarily accompanied by a substantively unitary awareness of the eternal truth, which is essentially harmony. The course of philosophy extending over a period of three years and envisaged to be an intensive, collective and personal search for knowledge bears its fruits as the partakers of this common journey genuinely commit themselves to the enhanced goodness of every human and the increased welfare of every creature, every plant, every ray of light and every particle of soil in this cosmos and feel the ecstatic joy over the same.

The period of Major Seminary Formation is a period of the personal integration and consolidation of all the various dimensions and aspects of formation that go into the making of a CST Priest. Required degree of human development in its affective and other aspects, friendships, a positive attitude to the interior solitude, active and critical involvement in the issues and problems of one’s context and a constructive and prophetic response to them, deepening the social and religious charisma of the congregation are qualities indispensable to our major seminarians.

Little Flower Seminary is also the common house of formation for the major seminarians of Little Flower Congregation. Normally, all our major seminarians do their philosophical studies in this Institute. This is to enhance the spirit of unity and mutual acquaintance and friendship among the members of the Congregation by means of living together, sharing and interaction. Thus this seminary stands out as an icon of unity and center of integration and co-ordination among the members of our Congregation.

The central symmetric image at the crest of the emblem is an allusion to the ancient Chinese symbol called tai- chi ‘T’ u or ‘Diagram of the supreme Ultimate’. The diagram is a symmetric organization of the dark yin and the bright yang -the two polar opposite forces are perfectly balanced here, each having the germ of its opposite. While the rotational nature of the symmetry suggests the dynamic aspect of reality, the blended harmony of the yin and the yang represents the supra conscious awareness that all differences and dichotomies are only apparent and relative within all embracing unity. The thrust of the academic training in this institute is as Krishna says in Gita, to “be in truth eternal, beyond the earthly opposites.”

Form a revelatory point of view, the Holy Cross is the symbol of unification and reconciliation. The cross having reconciled the polar opposite s of life and death, of good and evil, sends out the liberative energy to the emancipations of the entire reality. The background of the cross represents itself as the ultimate abode of the fusion for every multifaceted horizon of reality.

The hermeneutical tool towards the attainment of this goal is the reflective and critical sravana and manana of the spoken and written word and the insightful observation and meditation to the book of nature the two sources of revelation in Augustinian terms. This is attempted to represent in the intersecting of the books of scripture and the book of nature at the bottom of the emblem.The praxis of this intuitive and intellectual awakening is acompelling commitment to the service of the entire creation. Hence the motto of our institute: sarva bhuta hite ratah- those who delight in the welfare of all beings, the text of our motto is from Bhagavad Gita (5:25; 12:4). Here the dharma of the human is paraphrased as delight in the welfare of all beings. The Gita expects the perfect human to delight in, to go in ecstasy over the welfare of all beings.