The Symbols That Shape Us

The Power of Liturgical Spirituality (Part 4)

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THE DRAGON ON MY DESK

There is a red dragon on my desk. He has been lying there, with one watchful eye open, for a quarter of a century. He first appeared after I learned that dragons symbolise creativity in some cultures. I had always been driven to create. As a child, I sang, sketched in pencil, painted, did stone art, modelled with clay, wrote poetry, and brought hundreds of imaginary worlds into being. As a teenager, I learned to play music, and in my twenties I began recording my compositions. Later I started writing books, and learned to create my own videos. Without opportunities to create, my soul withers and I become listless and depressed.

The Christian environment in which I was raised did not celebrate the creativity of people like me. Over the years I have known many creatives who have left, or been thrown out of, churches because their creativity upset or disturbed the leaders and people of their communities. Musicians, artists, and poets are needed in the Church, but they are almost always treated with suspicion. Their creativity is viewed as rebellious, unpredictable, and dangerous, and so they are often subjected to stringent controls and restrictions on their work.

For decades I wrestled with the creative impulse within me. I wanted so desperately to be good, but I couldn’t help asking the ’wrong’ questions or sharing ‘difficult’ perspectives. At one stage, I even wondered whether my insatiable need to create was a symptom of some demonic possession. But when I began learning to understand the sacred nature of creativity and to celebrate my creative drive as a gift, I discovered that in some cultures, the dragon is a revered symbol of creativity.¹ Shortly after this epiphany, I saw my dragon in the window of a shop and knew that I needed him to remind me of the gift within me which I had just started to accept. Over the years, he has grown a little dusty and lost the claw off one wing. But he has remained with me through every move of house and work space. He has comforted and reassured me more times than I can count. He is nothing more than a ceramic symbol curled up in my line of sight. But he is also so much more than ‘just’ a symbol. He is a doorway into myself, and a perspective-shaping lens through which I perceive and engage with my world.

SYMBOLIC BEINGS

For as long as human beings have existed, we have used symbols to communicate, prepare for successful hunting and other endeavours, and for religious rituals. Symbols have been used to build cohesion in communities, to express collective identities, and to represent and remind people of their most important stories and values. For centuries, countries have used flags and other symbols to distinguish themselves from other nations. Political parties across the world choose their colours and symbols carefully as they seek to win and influence supporters. And all religious and spiritual traditions revere significant symbols for the meaning they hold. In today’s world, hundreds of companies trust in the power of their symbols (logos) to influence us. Would Nike have the same appeal without their famous ‘swoosh’ or Apple have such loyal and passionate customers if the fruit in their logo was whole?

There is no question that symbols play a massive, albeit often unrecognised, role in our lives, cultures, and societies. But defining symbols, and describing how they work, is a matter of debate. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the theory of symbolism — I am simply a liturgist who has used and created symbols for decades and witnessed their profound effect on the people who encounter them. My understanding of symbols follows that of Howard Gardner, and refers to “any entity (material or abstract) that can denote or refer to any other entity.”² As Gardner notes, this definition suggests that almost anything can be considered a symbol, “so long as it is used (and interpreted) as representing some kind of information” or experience. In my own practice, I have found that symbols can take the form of images, objects, metaphors, and gestures and, as such, our world is permeated with symbols, even though we often don’t perceive them as such.

In their book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson speak of metaphors in a way that resonates with my perspective on symbols. For them metaphors are an integral facet of our human ‘conceptual systems’ and they “structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people.”³ Our metaphors and symbols also empower our imagination, enabling us to conceive of and even experience what is not yet in existence. As a musician, I know what it is to ‘hear’ a piece of music in my head even before I begin to compose it on an instrument, and I know this is true for other artists as well.

All of this is to say that human beings are ‘symbolic creatures’. We embrace symbols, metaphors, imagination, and creativity not just because we can, but because we must. As Matthew Fox notes:

Creativity and imagination are not frosting on a cake: They are integral to our sustainability. They are survival mechanisms. They are the essence of who are. They constitute our deepest empowerment.⁴

Our use of symbols and metaphors, our reliance on our conceptual systems, is so natural and essential to our beings that we are often completely unaware of how we they influence us. To use an example from Lakoff and Johnson, in Western culture, our view of time is strongly connected with money. The metaphors we use around time are often financial in nature. We speak of wasting, saving, budgeting, and investing time. And so we tend to view time, like money, as a valuable but limited resource and we struggle to understand that there are cultures where time is perceived and experienced in a completely different way.⁵ You could, perhaps, picture this difference by looking at a clock on your wall or the watch on your wrist and comparing it to Salvador Dali’s famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, with its images of melting clocks that symbolise time’s relativity.

SYMBOLIC SPIRITUALITY

In every spiritual path, symbols are used to communicate core truths, values, and beliefs, and to invite devotees into an experience of transcendence or of an alternative reality. Symbols were often seen as a bridge between the ordinary world and the spiritual realm, between God and humanity, and they enabled people to engage with what is unseen and indescribable in visible and ‘tangible’ ways. The symbols themselves were not objects of worship, but rather a focus that helped to direct their attention and energy toward the deity, or the essence of life, that they did worship.⁶

But more than simply representing something or creating certain experiences, symbols also hold the power to transform us because they engage our subconscious selves. As Ilia Delio puts it, “A symbol allows the mind to access realms that are otherwise inaccessible or closed off to consciousness.”⁷ While stories speak to the heart and language engages the mind, symbols have the capacity to bypass our conscious awareness and speak directly to our subconscious. In this way, they inspire our imagination and enable us to envision the world and life we long for, not just as a picture in our minds, but as a reality which we can begin to feel and experience before it exists. The power of such visions is that they shape and direct our actions and interactions such that they empower us to build the life we have imagined.⁸