May 9, 2005
Symbol
Ask somebody to define symbol and you’ll probably get all kinds of answers and illustrations except the most obvious symbol of all — words. We don’t often think of words and language as symbols.
The reason for this may be that words are more often spoken than written, heard than seen, and thus the notions to which they point, of which they are signs, are lost. Much of the occasional flap about burning flags, which are a kind of language, themselves, is the result of this illiteracy about symbols. It comes from an inability to understand a symbol as something that finds the meaning of itself beyond itself, whose presence is irrelevant, save to recall, once that relationship is established.
The kinds of religion that consider their written scriptures verbally infallible do a gross disservice to words. They are sub-religions. John Evangelist might well wonder at such a practice, having delivered himself of so profoundly beautiful an illustration of Word as symbol.
The scriptures are collections and combinations of words into the stories that the people of God strive to tell of themselves and their God and of how they’ve been faithful and unfaithful to that relationship. Life is story, and as story, is made up of symbols.
Story is portrait, not photograph, process, not product, continuing, not terminal. Story is “once upon a time,” and can be anytime, but ultimately has no time, like a river canoe trip which is more destiny than end. You never get behind when you are in such a process. It is like a portrait that is never finished, but only suspends a moment in life. Life is always now. So it is that gifts are always presents, not pasts, or futures (except maybe at a stock exchange).
Story as parable is instrumental to accomplishing a goal. Crises in story are like hinges on a door. The people, the places, the events are the occasions for the crises. Once we enter a space with “do you remember the time when?” the “time whens” start, and the search for identity begins.
Our ancestors came largely not as fortune seekers, but as identity seekers, identity maintainers, shapers, and for a sense of place. The crises in their search came at the intersections, the turning points. To seek fortune was to turn back on identity, and that is when the story stops.
When we read our scriptures, this is replicated in our own lives. They help us discover who we are and for whom we are called out.