Signification

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

-Hamlet

Last night, the post-sunset sky was beautiful.  Overhead was a deep blue canopy with just a few of the brighter starts poking out.  Near the horizion the blue gradually changed to the deep orange which was touching the horizon.  It was lovely in its own right, but I think part of its beauty was it reminded me of when I was in Assisi and how the sky looked just the same that night right after the sun set.  Last night's sky visually quoted what I had seen before.  It's funny how our memories work like that.  I think Fall is one of my favorite seasons partially because there are so many memories which are associated with its sights and smells.  These memories aren't necessarily concrete either, but there is a certain emotional memory that becomes active.  There is something that stirs within me.  But this happens not just with Fall.  All the other seasons, particularly at the change of the seasons, have their own associations and their own different feelings.

Dusk in Assisi, Italy

These feelings are often inarticulate.  You can't really describe them, or why they are so moving.  Explaining them is about as difficult as explaining beauty.  But it's as though when you experience Fall, you experience not just this Fall, but all your Falls.  Indeed, if you stop to think, you might realize that its not just your Falls either, but all the Falls in the history of the world.  For the season are all part of this circle of life, an experience our fellow humans have shared for centuries.  It seems to me that every Fall, not only is the immediate experience there, but implicitly all of those other Falls are present as well.  They are re-presented. 

This phenomenon is recreated in many ways.  At the weddings of others, couples remember their own vows with joy.  At funerals, the sadness of loss is compounded as people recall other loved ones that they have lost.  When you see a wonderful sunrise, you think of other such sunrises.  Certain places have associations, perhaps that treasured place in the woods or the experience of being on a hill or at the seashore in general.  It happens when we see ourselves in someone younger because we were one like that, or when we recognize patterns in our own behavior.

This is the nature of a symbol.  It brings with it not just itself, but all the other things it represents as well.  It shouldn't be surprising that the good art makes heavy use of symbol, for symbols endow life with meaning and significance.  Think even of subtle ways art does this.  In Wagner's Ring, his delightful series of operas, there are musical themes which are associated with different characters or places.  These musical themes not only reinforce the significance of these characters or places, but also work in the opposite direction, bringing the places or characters into the music.  The same thing is used in well written movie soundtracks, such as the Lord of the Rings.  I need not list more overt artistic symbols, but the Scartlet Letter itself comes to mind.  Again, we need not be able to explain how these symbols work, but we somehow know that they bring extra meaning with them.  (P.S. If anyone has ideas about what the deer crossing the tracks in the movie Stand by Me was all about, let me know.)

As I have reflected elsewhere, the Lord of the Rings (the books, not the films) is effective perhaps because of the smallness of the events in the book.  Yes, the War for the Ring is exciting and the biggest thing to happen in any of the characters' lifetimes, but it is set against the background of a deep history of Middle Earth.  Sauron isn't the greatest evil that has even existed, but is a mere shadow of Melkor, the fallen Vala.  Aragorn and Arwen are only fully understood in the light of Beren and Luthien.  But symbols are also dynamic.  They can articipate the future.  One could make the case that Beren and Luthien can't be understood without Aragorn and Arwen either.  The reality goes much deeper than the surface.

As the literary symbols show us, we need not be conscious of the symbolism for it to work.  The characters of a book certainly don't have to know they are acting symbolically for it to be so.  This is reinforced by the fact that symbols are dynamic and can reach into the future.  So while many of my examples suggested that symbols have a reality that is only contained in personal memory and consciousness, this is not entirely true.  I want to suggest that symbols carry a certain meaning, regardless of whether anyone be aware of them.  However, memory is extremely important, because this is the way in which individuals become aware of the deep reality which surrounds us.

Because memory is so important, and I suppose something could be said about the way in which corporate memory can also help to preserve symbols and their meaning.  I mention, as once before, the importance of memory in the Christian and Jewish traditions, in particular giving meaning to the Eucharistic meal or the Passover meal respectively.  These symbolic meals are not 'mere symbols,' but are understood to make present the reality which they symbolize.  But, without taking away from the special significance of these religious memorials, I'm not sure that there is a such thing as a 'mere symbol.'  Symbols all seem to contain what they signify to varying degrees.

I guess the point of all this is that there is meaning all around you, if only you open your eyes and look for it.  Reality runs deep.

(Note: Something should be said about my use of the word 'symbol.'  In most, if not all, instances where I used the word, 'sign' might be an appropriate substitution.  Symbols are strictly defined as things with represent another thing, but are distinct from it.  So language is a symbolic system, where there is no intrinsic relationship between the sound of the word and its meaning (except perhaps in cases of onomatopia).  The word 'cat' could easily have been used to refer to what we call 'dog.'  This stricter use of the word 'symbol' gets blurred and acquires meanings similar to the word 'sign' in more common parlance.  I use the word 'symbol' in this other way. Hopefully, the reader has understood what I meant throughout the post.)

Pensées

Sometimes lots of good ideas just hit you at once.  Indeed, it happens to me quite often that I'm overwhelmed with all the good things I want to do, the things I want to plan, the books I want to read, and the things I want to write.  The main problem is they can't all possibly be done at once, so it just leaves me in a frantic rush to do as much as I possibly can and then fizzles out by the time my alarm goes off the next morning and I don't feel like getting out of bed.  My goal here, writing today, is simply to write a few scatter thoughts that have been on my mind, each worthy of a blog post in their own right.  A big problem for me is that I am too meticulous in my writing.  I try almost too hard to express precisely what I want, when in fact no words will be perfect in describing what it is I'm talking about.  I spend too much time trying to find the perfect phrase, etc.  So I am trying to do the exact opposite right here and now.  I'm just simply going to write.  I hope my scattered thoughts you might find interesting, but in someways I just want to get them down on (virtual) paper.  It's quite possible that this way of writing might just be the perfect way to make ideas stick.  Peter Kreeft, philosopher at Boston College, thinks that Blaise Pascal's Pensées is one of the best books ever written precisely because it is unfinished and scattered.  If it had been completed and followed a perfectly logical progression, it would have been ruined.  So God in his mercy killed Pascal before his book was finished.  I don't know whether I agree with Kreeft, but Pensées is pretty good and if I volunteer to write down unfinished thoughts, maybe God will spare my life.

One things that's been on my mind is the idea of self forgetfulness.  There is another answer to the riddle which I proposed in my last post.  The Self.  The only way to find one's self is to completely forget one's self.  Get so caught up in what you are doing, that you become completely unselfconscious.  Self-consciousness is generally a bad sign.  If you are self conscious, you can never truly be yourself in social situations.  If you are self conscious about the kind of job you are doing, you are probably doing a bad job.  To paraphrase Kreeft, no one ever made a good impression by trying to make one.  Just think about the absentminded genius.  They are so lost in their work, that they forget to take care of themselves or they even forget where they are.  Learning to become disinterested to even one's own desires and happiness is moving swiftly down the road to joy.
I love the change of the seasons.  Much to my joy, I've discovered that the smell and feeling of Fall is the same in London, England as it is in Southeast Michigan, or South Bend, Indiana.  The first days of any change in season are always so wonderful.  The smell brings back memories of the same time in years past, as does the feel of the wind or the weather.  Running around the nearby park has brought back memories of playing high school soccer on windy days in October.  It reminds me of my backyard during fall, both in Michigan and even dimly in Indiana, though I was seven or younger at that time.  I think of playing kickball in the backyard with friends.  I think of the leaves falling around the lakes at Notre Dame, and driving up Notre Dame avenue just after Fall break, the golden dome in view.  I am reminded of beautiful faces.  Fall makes me feel lovesick and homesick at the same time.

Friends.  It's struck me that those friendships which I most especially value are those which make me feel completely humbled.  I've been blessed through my life to meet many wonderful people.  Sometimes I just wonder to myself in sort of awe, "How is it that I am so lucky?"  There isn't anything that I could possibly have done to make myself worthy of this friendship.  And so I experience their friendship as pure gift.  Friendship is a gift you give, but more importantly is a gift that you receive.  When I go wrong is when I think "shouldn't these people want to be my friend.  Yeah, I've got lots of great personal qualities."  The reality is that I do not deserve to have friends and that I can't make anyone be my friend.  It is pure gift.  It's about standing in receptivity to the gift of another person.  For a Christian, I think friendships are particularly important because they teach us how to be a receiver, the relationship we always stand in towards God.

I think this bit about friendship ties in nicely with the theme of self-forgetfulness.  In a true friendship, the self-consciousness of meeting someone has fallen away.  You no longer think about thinks like "What sort of questions should I ask this person?  What should I say?  What do they think of me?"  Ironically, it is losing this self-consciousness in relationship that allows one to be oneself and to actually share more of oneself.  Deep friendships have reached the point where sharing deep truths about one's self is easy and natural.  It's as though the barrier of the self has broken down.

What about love?  (Upon reflection, that questions terribly deals with the ambiguity of our language.  Let me rephrase: "What about Eros?")  I have found it difficult to think about marriage in terms of this ethic of self-forgetfulness.  In my present thinking, I haven't been able to see the married state as something which does enough to "draw one out of The Self."  I'm not saying the problem is with marriage, but rather the problem is with my own inadequacy.  When I look a marriage, I see a good thing, a beautiful thing.  There are many things I find attractive about that state of life.  But were I drop everything and get married today, I would be pursuing it as something that I want, something that I think would make me happy.  I want this woman to love me and I want to love her and spend time with her because that gives me joy.  Thought of like this, that is hardly a drawing out of the self.  But like I said the problem is with me.  I've never reached the state (or if I have, I don't remember it particularly well), where I've been so transported by the joys of Erotic love that my own desires have melted away and my self so forgotten so that the 'I' becomes 'we.'  I've not reached that place where lifelong love and commitment becomes not something that I want as I, but as some completely natural and seemingly inevitable next-step to join together a selfless 'we.'  Perhaps I'm romanticising love too much.  However, it does make perfect sense to me when older, happily married couples say that "We've more in love now that when we were first married."  It's because they lived through so much together, and have been required to make so many sacrifices, that they most certainly had to forget themselves and their own wants.  I mean they have made sacrifices not in a petty, "We'll do what you want because it makes me feel good to give you what want," sort of way, but in a way which requires real pain.
(Edit: I don't mean to introduce a discontinuity between friendship and Eros.  Indeed, I think a true romance will inspire a feeling of humility just as a true friendship does, and that romantic love will be experienced as a gift, just as friendship is.  I also think they pose a similar challege, in that both are often initially sought in response to a personal desire, but in both that desire can be transcended.  What I wrote about Eros could easily have been written by someone else about friendship.  Perhaps, I should just retract the whole paragraph.  Nevertheless, I think it is true to say that perhaps because there is greater attraction to Eros and the possibility for self-transcendence is even higher, it is more difficult to initially escape the self-seeking element.  The reflection above betrays the subjective state of the author and should be understood accordingly.)

The last paragraph took me an outrageous amount of time to write compared with the rest of the post.  If it's the worst paragraph, it certainly proves Kreeft's theory.  In anycase, I hope I can return to a more free-flowing style for the last few thoughts here.  The first is, when thinking about self-forgetfulness and such over the past few days, its occured to me that perhaps I should blog less.  While blogging might initially seem more other-directed than simply journaling, for me this is entirely not true.  Way too often I am motivated to blog in part by a vain desire to have others admire what I've writen, combined with a need to share what I am thinking.  But perhaps what is even more annoying, is that when I have an awesome thought, I can automatically think to myself "Boy, that would make a great blog post.  Won't people think I'm awesome for having such a great thought."  That spoils the thought as a thought in its own right, and is pretty vain to boot.  Although, if I decided just to journal about these thoughts, I'll probably still have an intrusive complusion to journal.  Perhaps the easiest solution to allay some of these qualms is to just check my Blogger stats much less often.

Finally, related to the blogging/thought hoarding problem, I've often gotten frustrated in my past trying to obsessively seize with my mind beauty things or cool experiences.  The worst is when I have a camera, which becomes an extension of my mind, and I begin to take pictures complusively, trying to save the memory of what is there.  Not that I discourage picture-taking, but I've found the enjoyment of a thing is often spoiled by trying to enjoy it.  Better just to be receptive and to let things come as they are.  Then you'll be surprised what you can enjoy if you are not trying.

Later Dudes (and Dudettes for those feminists who claim that the word 'dude' excludes 'dudettes.'  Actually, why do some feminists insist that terms like 'waiter' works now for both 'waiter' and 'waitress,' but get really mad if I don't specify 'woman' in addition to the term 'man?'  Perhaps they would get offened that I specified 'dudettes.'  I'm so confused.  And I wish everybody would stop making generalizations.)!

Concerning Aliens, Faith, Reason, Memory, and Religious Experience

The following gem comes from the movie "Contact" based on the novel by Carl Sagan.  A video of the scene from which the dialogue is taken can be found here.

Senator: You come to us with no evidence, no record, no artifacts. Only a story that, to put it mildly, strains credibility... Are you really going to sit there and tell us that we should just take this all on faith?

Ellie Arroway: Is it possible that it didn't happen? Yes. . . . As a scientist I must concede that. I must volunteer that.

...

Mr. Kitz: Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony and admit that this journey to the center of the galaxy, in fact, never took place?

Ellie Arroway: Because I can't. I had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision of the universe that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how ... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not — that none of us — are alone! ... I wish I could share that. I wish, that everyone, if only for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope! But ... that continues to be my wish.

 Dr. Arroway, an admitted unbeliever, is here describing and defending the reality of her remarkable journey into deep space.  The surprise is that everything which this woman of science is describing about the effect of her journey can be applied to a mystical/religious experience.  Religious experience (and the resulting belief in God) is something which can't really be proven.  Evaluated in the cold light of reason, there is always another possible explanation, which is often simpler (cf. Occam's razor).  Yet faith is something given which touches the very core of a person's being, transforming the believer and opening up a way of seeing things which is endowed with meaning.  "The thing that people are most hungry for, meaning, is the one thing that science hasn't been able to give them," reflects the character, Palmer Joss.  Religion, on the other hand, has.

There is a difficulty, however, in communicating a faith which stems from experience.  It is the experience itself that creates certainty in the believer.  Reason cannot verify the experience, but somehow the heart knows what it has experienced is true.  As Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."  But if faith comes from experience, my personal experience will probably not be convincing to you, no matter how vividly I feel it.  Recall Dr. Arroway's line: "I wish I could share that. I wish, that everyone, if only for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope! But ... that continues to be my wish."

In reflecting on the relationship between faith and reason, I've thought that perhaps faith ultimately has to come from experience, or something like it.  By some means or another, the heart has to be moved to believe.  Reason can't give us faith, because, without any premises from which to start, it is impossible to prove anything by reason.  We cannot even prove that we are awake instead of dreaming.  Again I turn to Pascal:

We know that we do not dream, and, however impossible it is for us to prove it by reason, this inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, but not, as they affirm, the uncertainty of all our knowledge. For the knowledge of first principles, as space, time, motion, number, is as sure as any of those which we get from reasoning. And reason must trust these intuitions of the heart, and must base them on every argument.

Here is the real problem: If God is known through experience or intuition, then why are there unbelievers? Wouldn't God want everyone to know him?  Why doesn't he make his presence more known?  Why doesn't he give us surer intuitions or experiences, ones which our reason cannot so easily question?  There may not even be a satisfactory answer to this question, so I will not attempt a detailed explanation here.  Perhaps God reveals just enough of himself so that only those who want to find him can, and those who don't want to don't have to.  Pascal proposes another reason: it is our sinful passions which obscure God from us.  "Convince yourself [that God exists]," he writes, "not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions."  But if Deus absconditus est most of the time, God does appear in hints and shadows, if only in hints and shadows.  Orual sees the palace for a split second in C.S. Lewis' novel Till We Have Faces, a work which conveys Lewis' own answer to the problem.

I want to suggest that memory is indispensable for having faith in a universe where God's presence isn't overwhelming.  Experiences, like Orual seeing the palace, are isolated to a particular point in time.  Memory allows those experiences to be brought into the present.  This is part of the reason memory plays such an important role in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.  The Jewish feast of Passover is a memorial of the original Passover meal, when the Jewish people were freed from slavery and bondage in Egypt.  When Jews today celebrate the Passover meal, they understand they are not simply reenacting the meal that saved their ancestors thousands of years ago.  Rather, they understand that they are participating in the ongoing saving action of God, who saves them personally in the here and now.  It is in a similar light that Christians understand the exhortation of Christ to offer bread and wine "in memory of me." The act of commemorating the Last Supper is understood as something which brings Christ's once-and-for-all, saving sacrifice on the cross into the present, so that the merits of this action can be communicated to the believer. 

Perhaps we've all had those moments of great clarity or insight, when we finally we able to see the meaning in all the work we've been undertaking.  Or we've had that moment when we're sure that God exists because of some great grace that we've received.  Some of the great saints, the mystics, report having experiences in which they were indescribably enlightened.  St. Ignatius reported mystical experiences that were so powerful that even if the Bible didn't exist and he had no other source of religious knowledge, he would have willingly died for the faith in light of his experience.  At the same time, the mystics, who had such vivid experiences of God, were often the ones who went through the greatest experiences of isolation, the dark night of the soul.  How could they have possibly gotten through those times?  The answer must be memory.  Their only source of hope was the memory of the Lord's blessings, the trust that at some point they would be brought from darkness into light.  Though to a lesser extent, I reckon we all go through moments when life seems meaningless and lonely.  These moments are the true test of faith, when a trusting leap is required.  It is then we are called to remember.

Faith is an inexhaustible subject for reflection.  I in no way intend to be definitive about the relationship between faith, experience, and memory.  Perhaps, I miss the mark in saying that faith comes from experience and intuition.  But, I do believe that faith is a gift.  It is not reducible to reason, but is something, like love, which goes far beyond our reason.

By the rivers of Babylon we sat mourning and weeping when we remembered Zion.
If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.
May my tongue stick to my palate if I do not remember you, If I do not exalt Jerusalem beyond all my delights.

Psalm 137:1, 5-6