Skip to main content

Sign, Symbol and Sacrament

 



This is a sign in the door of a café in Finisterre. Finisterre means "The End of the Earth", so it's a kind of joke: the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe - Douglas Adams! Geddit? ...Oh never mind. Anyway, when I got to this place the café was closed, and had a sign on the door to say precisely that, but unless you read a little Spanish you might still try the door. That's the thing about signs: they are one dimensional and depend, for their effectiveness in communicating information, on a commonality of understanding between signer and signee. All across Spain we blissfully entered museums by the wrong doors, parked in the wrong places and queued at the wrong ticket windows because our commonality of understanding was somewhat impaired. 

But there were other signs we encountered that didn't depend on language. 

Like this one for instance. 

Walking past this little chapel, on a mountainside at sunrise, I didn't have to ask what kind of building it was. But the cross was more than an advertisment. That morning I was alone in the Picos de Europa, as far from my home as it is possible to be, and the sky was vast. Beneath me the mist was rising from the lake around which I was going to walk in an hour's time. There was dew on the gentians and erica and the larks rose before me as I walked, trailing their convoluted songs across the early morning air. It was a joyous moment, and the cross summed up, and gave silent voice to my sense of freedom and gratitude. Crosses are symbols. That is, they are signs which don't depend on a common language or an agreed code of meaning to be understood. In my back yard the bees move towards my blue shirt because deep in their little brains there is some ancient coding predisposing them to like blue things. And in us, highly evolved primates that we are, there is a myriad of similar deep, pre-programmed responses. Symbols draw on the deep wells of our evolutionary and cultural and familial and personal history to speak to us in ways far deeper than mere logic and understanding. 

Symbols are deeper than signs. They give expression to things beyond words and like any other avenue of communication, they can be transformative. But there is a level which is deeper than symbol and that level is sacrament. Consider this composite photo:
There are 2 pictures of the same person, taken only a few years apart. They are, obviously, of the Queen, but in the intervening period between photographs, something has happened to her. On the left she is the Princess Elizabeth, or Mrs Mountbatten-Windsor, depending on your point of view. On the right she is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Between the two pictures she has undergone a profound change; namely the sacrament of coronation. A sacrament is a symbolic action which effects a change in our very being: we are not the same as we were before once we have willingly participated in the sacrament. I can't stress this strongly enough. You are a different thing after the sacrament than you were before, and this is why sacraments must be so carefully and wisely cherished.

In the Anglican church we recognise 2 sacraments : Baptism and Eucharist; and we argue the toss about another 5: anointing; confirmation; ordination; absolution; and marriage. I'm not going to get into that here, but I have participated in all of these 7 as a receiver and a a giver and know that each is an instrument for profound, and usually unexpected change. My friend Alden says sailing is a sacrament, and I think I agree with him. I know that pilgrimage is a sacrament, as is silence, because they are symbolic actions which effect real and lasting transformation.

Part of the hubris of our era is that we think that we can explain and therefore dismiss all manner of mysteries. So marriage is "just" a piece of paper, or the deep peace of meditation is "just" the action of serotonin or ordination is "just" an interesting career choice. How foolish we are. When Jesus entrusted his work to his disciples he told them to baptise: that is, to be instruments of change in people's lives using all manner of methods, some of which reach far deeper than thought and far deeper than culture. It's an extraordinary privilege and responsibility to be so trusted.   


Labels:

Comments

Father Ron said…
YES!, Kelvin. "Mysterium Tremendens". Enjoy Advent and Christmas in your Deep South
11 December 2020 at 11:15
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more