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In your Easter letter, you wrote a lot about 'symbols' of the Resurrection—and about being frequently told what they are 'supposed to' symbolize.

But if one needs to be told what it means, then it seems to me that the symbol itself is vitiated. The lily can hardly be an effective symbol of life-out-of-death to one who has never planted a bulb and seen it bloom; nor the egg to one who has never seen a hatchling.

In some relatively harmless cases (e.g., hot cross buns) it may be enough to simply say, 'Our family has done that for generations on Good Friday' or whatever, but too many of our religious symbols no longer symbolize anything without explanation.

For instance, the censing of the altar in the Eucharist was originally intended to be a 'washing' of the altar, a 'fumigation,' with the incense wreathing up and around the sides of the altar, to cleanse and prepare it for the Oblations—but nowadays it just means the Celebrant wanders around the altar waving smoke in the air (for no other reason than that it says so in 'Ritual Notes'). Another example in that same line is the censing of the altar during the Gloria—originally that was a censing of the walls of the entire church building to prepare it for the Eucharist (see Pseudo-Dionysius: "The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy" Ch. 3, §11)—but now it is a totally meaningless and purposeless redundancy—since the altar is going to be censed yet again at the Offertory.

Anyway, a symbol which needs to be explained and is not at all self-evident seems to have really lost its symbolic impact—and we ought to re-examine some of those symbols and see if they have any relevant meaning at all in 21st century America.

Fr. John-Julian, OJN
The Order of Julian of Norwich
Hartland, Wisconsin, USA
johnjulianojn@sbcglobal.net
21 April 2014

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