Symbol Making, Making Life
Reflecting this morning on the use of symbol in Medieval art, and utterly amazed at how deep the idea of symbol-making is in the human being. The first time I ever saw a "dictionary of symbols" I could not imagine why one was needed. But in trying to grasp the breadth of the medieval symbol system, it is truly the learning of a different language, a different way of seeing, of looking.
I was standing at the door of my office, thinking about what I'd just read regarding Christ as the door in medieval Cathedrals, and all of a sudden, images of people throughout the centuries making decisions about making things with symbolic meaning flooded me. When we go to make a thing (anything, really), is there any way to not at least touch our desire to invest the thing made with some part of ourselves, our views on the good, the beautiful, and the real? Looking around my office, I began to see the choices I've made as to decor symbolifically, trying to discern what symbols were there, many perhaps chosen subconsciously, and I began to wonder how aware we are these days that we are, at heart, symbol makers. Metaphor makers.
Symbol and metaphors are connectors, ideas associated with one thing traveling across a comparative road to line up with the other thing, and in that linking, new meaning, thought and/or feeling is found. (Certainly new understanding, whether that understanding be accurate or not.)
Is this how the unseen meets the seen? Is this one of the bridges by which spirit becomes flesh?
I am beginning to think that the symbol making tendency is at the heart of what it means to make the world. Is it too far to say that each action is a symbol of the inner life, in that the concrete now stands as a pointer to the inner, unseen thought that gives rise to it? This is the nature of art making, the nature of living artfully.
Why this is so important to me to consider, I can't really say. It is an issue of awareness, I suppose. Thank God the postmodern church, what many call the emerging church, is responding to this idea of humanity as symbol makers.
What symbols will our lives create today, and to what will they point?
11:14:37 AM
