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Sept.
2003 |
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Finding
meaning in
Mounds Bars, honey bees |
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Let
symbols help summon the sacred in your family life |
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Clarice held up an empty
Mounds candy bar wrapper and began to tell the story of
her bit of “holy litter,” usually on prominent
display in her office.
As a young Catholic mother with five children, Clarice
ran her home in the manner in which she herself was raised:
her husband came first, then the children, and at a distant
third, herself. The cost of such self-effacement eventually
registered in emotional and spiritual disintegration.
The therapist Clarice consulted gave her an occasional
task for homework. One of her first assignments involved
grocery shopping.
Each time she did the weekly shopping, Clarice was to
buy herself a candy bar. She was not to share it with
her children or her husband, even if they asked. For Clarice,
the Mounds candy bar came to symbolize a legitimate caring
for herself. It was the beginning of reclaiming her worth
as a human being, her dignity as a wife and mother.
Now every time she looks at the Mounds wrapper, Clarice
encounters the meaning behind the candy bar: “I
give so much to everyone around me; I must not forget
to give to myself.”
A symbol is an object that is associated with and serves
to identify something else. The Hogwarts School emblem
is immediately identifiable to hundreds of thousands of
children and adults; a cross universally marks the sign
of a Christian. Honey bees, however fashionable of late
for designers, mean something entirely different to me
than they might to the rest of the world.
The laws of physics and aerodynamics say it is impossible
for a honey bee to fly — its wings are much too
small and light for the weight of its body — and
yet fly it does, with sure and determined grace. I am
like that bee. When I hold a small, stone-cast bee in
my hand, I savor again the secret of who I am: a human
person suspended in a mystery I cannot begin to understand.
I am told that the Hebrew root of the name “Deborah”
means “bee.” It pleases me to know this.
Symbols summon
the sacred
When symbols summon the sacred for us they are in the
category we call sacramentals. Sacramentals, with a small
“s,” are officially those things which indirectly
bring us into the presence of the holy: holy water fonts,
rosaries, candles, chants, crosses, to name just a few.
Unofficially, sacramentals are infinite in number: nature,
music, poetry, photographs, memories, anything that bridges
creature and Creator.
Small children are surrounded by objects that are meaningful
for them — a special blanket, a first doll, a Mother
Goose plate and cup.
These belongings signal security for them. However, as
those children grow up, they may associate these things
directly with the love of the nuclear family. As still
more time passes and those children’s grandchildren
come into the possession of certain artifacts, their association
with them may deepen and develop into a gratitude for
the life passed on from their ancestors.
Henry Ward Beecher said, “What the mother sings
to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.”
Whatever habits, values and yes, symbols, we revere as
parents will find their way into a child’s makeup.
Though angels as contemporary symbols are certainly trite,
you may have a particular painting in your bedroom of
the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation which mediates,
for you, an encounter with the Holy Spirit, asking to
be re-birthed in you each time you see it. Once you explain
how meaningful this angel is for you, your child will
never forget.
When our children were in first grade, their art teacher
showed them how to draw the Last Supper. From the table,
to the loaf of bread, to each balding egg-head, there
were lots of oval shapes! We framed and hung each of them
in our dining room. No Da Vinci invites me to the sacred
meal in quite the same way as these penciled primitives.
The symbol calls up the original sacrifice and echoes
it into the present where we express ourselves as sacraments
for each other at the table.
Symbols speak
differently to people
Symbols are not collections of things. Their intrinsic
value is not counted in dollars and cents. A symbol says
something about the essentialness of the one who cherishes
it; it does not necessarily speak in the same way to others.
At a very posh dinner party, an older woman sat with the
most stunning diamond bracelet on her left wrist. Noticing
a series of indelible numbers tattooed on the inside of
the woman’s right wrist, a table companion inquired
of the woman’s husband why she did not wear the
bracelet to cover the offending “souvenir”
of the death camps. Her husband explained quietly that
the numbers were more precious to her than any jewel on
earth or in heaven. It is not just the Christian who understands
the paschal mystery.
Symbols make meaning. An object, a song, a poem, anything
that can be seen or heard or felt or tasted or touched
can be a mediator of invisible realities. Strategic placement
of significant symbol-objects in our work and home environments
invites prayer each time we pass them.
The recovering alcoholic who keeps anniversary coins for
sobriety in a candy dish is renewed with gratitude each
time he lets them fall through his fingers. Spent bullet
casings from the veterans’ salute at your father’s
funeral instantly summon the association you will always
make with the crack of rifles in winter and the startling
unexpectedness of death. A prayer for mercy attends such
symbols.
Personal symbols are holy because they cause us to pay
attention to where and how and why we are alive here and
now under these particular circumstances. In accepting
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, Czeslaw Milosz
said: “Our planet gets smaller every year, and with
its fantastic proliferation of mass media is witnessing
a process that defies definition, characterized by a refusal
to remember.” Materialism is devoted to the production
of images, messages, and stimulation that keeps us distracted
from suffering, compassion and justice, the real business
we are about.
Are reminders
to reconcile, renew
Our symbols help us to remember ... and to reconcile and
to renew. Appreciating such sacramentals at home enriches
the experience of humanness we bring to communal sacraments.
The grace we find there is no-thing, not a commodity,
but an outpouring of relationship to God and to one another.
Some people talk about finding God — as if God could
get lost. Every single thing around us is God’s
outstretched hand. Once in a while one of these things
— a rock, a bee, a painting — catches our
attention long enough for us to put our hand out in response.
And what is communicated is more than rock-ness or bee-ness
or color. It is the is-ness of God. We really need to
have our symbols with us because they immediately remind
us of what we know, without the burden of having to understand
it. Our symbols are shot through with the is-ness of God!
And if we dare believe it, so are we.
“There wouldn’t be such a thing as counterfeit
gold if there were no real gold somewhere” (old
Sufi proverb). Though our symbols are surely not counterfeit,
we can trust that they point us in the direction of that
which is Real and lasting and forever.
(Gannon is director of RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation
of Adults) at St. James Parish, Mequon.) |
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