Catholic Fundamentalists spend a lot of time trying to picture how lost souls look, surrounded as they are by demons seeking to keep them away from God. This picture, of a swarm of bees surrounding the queen, perfectly illustrates a lost soul surrounded by individual evil spirits keeping it isolated from its loving Creator:
Every time we pray for a soul buried within such a swarm of evil spirits, we can picture one or more them being knocked away. Lots of praying is necessary! If we are able to pray the way Jesus could call upon The Programmer for programming assistance, the entire swarm would go away in a micro-second.
Prayers work from the outside in, as when a beekeeper sweeps away the bees to move the queen within the swarm to the hive in which she can do the work she’s designed to do. Prayers can also work from the inside out. A prayer that slices through the cloud of bees that hits directly upon the queen may cause her to crawl out of the swarm and fly to a new place. A soul can only be surrounded, immobilized, and destroyed by sins when it stops moving toward He Who programmed it.
We may also use an imaginary reverse of this picture to indicate what a saved soul resembles. When the soul is saved, the bees represent a protective cloud of angels around it. Each is clearer than crystal. They allow God’s light to reach the soul they protect.
