Our modern culture seems to have an allergy to symbolic meaning. We live in a world (I speak for those of us in the US, at least) that has primed us from birth to be literal-minded people.
We deal better with signs rather than symbols. The difference between the two is that signs are literal. They point directly to something (the stop sign says STOP, so we stop). A symbol carries a deeper meaning. To stay with the imagery of the stop sign, the red color symbolizes stopping, but it can also mean ‘warning’ or a myriad of other things in different contexts. (This stop sign example is a dreadfully limited one; please forgive me.)
The symbology of the ancient church has been carefully and prayerfully designed through the millennia to open us to a deep interior sense of the sacred rather to point directly to some angry sociopath’s contrived dogma.
Our allergy to symbolism is why a lot of us have a hard time with the historic liturgy. Our modern brains are looking for literal signs in church (and everywhere). This is why people are so drawn to tyrants who tell us exactly how they think God wants us to live, OR ELSE (followed by a 45-minute set from a praise band, of course). But the ancient mass (as an example of my tradition’s context) gives us archetypal and primordial symbols of light, darkness, inclusion, exclusion, feasting, fasting, etc. This symbology has been carefully and prayerfully designed through the millennia to open us to a deep interior sense of the sacred rather than to point directly to some angry sociopath’s contrived dogma.
The late historian from the University of Chicago, Mircea Eliade, likened this loss of the sacred to a ‘second fall’ of humanity into secular and desacralized existence.
Here’s Eliade (my brackets below are an attempt to iron out the gender stuff that might get in our way today)…
“In [our] deepest being, [humanity] still retains a memory of [the sacred], as, after the first ‘fall’ [our] ancestor, the primordial [human], retained intelligence enough to enable [us] to rediscover the traces of God that are visible in the world.”
Mircea Eliade
So, though our modern culture has left us without a healthy way of connecting with ancestral sacred symbology, we have within us a timeless memory of it. I believe that a part of us yearns for it. But because church has been rendered irrelevant (especially the more ancient and traditional form of church), we go looking to assuage this symbolic memory in tribalism, ideology, and all kinds of ways, some of which are harmful.
In my own case, it was when I stumbled into the ancient liturgy of a Roman Catholic mass after almost 20 years of being away that brought me back into the Christian fold and led to me eventually entering seminary to become a (Lutheran) priest. It was the ancient words, hymns, chants, smells, sounds, tastes, and movements of my Roman Catholic upbringing (which I thought I kicked to the curb decades ago) that made me feel small again. It made me feel connected to the global communion of saints. I felt the presence of our ancestors who said these same words, sung these same songs, and ate the same bread and wine millennia ago. While culture tells me that the point is to live large and significant (particularly in status, production, consumption, and monetary wealth), this sacred liturgy reminded me that, in my smallness, God loved me exactly where I was - in my flawed and lovingly limited insignificance. I got the sense that, though in the eyes of my predominant secular performance-based culture, I was insignificant… In the eyes of God, I was loved to the core of my being. God was bonkers about me and I never even had to lift a finger to earn it.
I’m ranting now. I could go on, but I’ll close by saying…
This is why I see it as an integral part of my vocation to carry these sacramental celebrations forward. For they connect us with the memory of the deep past and eternal hope for the future.
May the living God awaken us from our symbolic amnesia and help us recover sacred meaning through the evocative power of symbols that the ancient universal church can provide.
As Ever,Jonas
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