So, people may read stories from my past or musings from my present and conclude I am not a believer in Christ. That, of course, depends on who you think Christ is. I am a believer in the Christ who functions within the human psyche as the Potential–facultas– to save us from ourselves, that is, the Christ who is able to prevent our self-immolation, our destruction of the natural world, and our desire for domination.
I do not believe the Bible is the infallible or inerrant or absolute Word of God. That doctrine is indefensible. If in order to be "saved," I have to believe that one of the disciples caught a fish with a gold coin in its mouth to pay a tax, well, then, count me among the lost. Can't do it. Can't believe that God made the sun stand still so Joshua could defeat his enemies, men, women, and infants. Can't believe that God will punish people forever in a lake of fire because they didn't accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. Not only am I unable to believe these and other preposterous claims, but I'm also sick to death of people making a "rational" case for them. It's embarrassing: the "God loves you unconditionally, but if you get it wrong, you'll burn forever" contradiction.
On the other hand, the biblical narrative has generated a constellation of symbols within the Catholic Church—from the humblest parish to St. Peter's Basilica—and I believe in and revere the Christ who inhabits and emerges from these symbols. They have evolved over long centuries and shape our imaginations through their creative tension with one other. The Christ who emerges from that tension could subvert our desire to dominate, sublimate our most destructive tendencies, and "create within us a new heart." The problem, it seems to me, is that we don't think about the symbols or the radicality of their meaning or their analogy to consciousness, which is, of course, what makes us human. Furthermore, we hold our imaginations in such low regard that we don't value the work of Christ that takes place in the interplay of symbols within the imagination. A fundamentalist might protest, "Surely, Christ didn't die and rise again merely in our imagination!"
My response to that is, natural disasters aside, all of human history is a product of our imagination. It does not serve humanity well to belittle the imagination.
It's worth remembering that the word "symbol" is from the Greek prefix sym, which means "together," as in symphony—a "sounding together"—and the verb ballein, which means to "throw" or "hurl." A "symbol" is a hurling together of image and meaning, a simultaneous clash and consummation, rather like a couple on their honeymoon or a man nailed to a cross. A "symbol" is more active, more dynamic, than a "sign," which is derived from the Latin noun signum and means "identifying mark." A signum can be natural—as in geese flying south as a sign of winter—or conventional—as in a signature at the bottom of a contract. Signs may bind, but symbols are always shouting at you, if you listen to them.
A sacrament is a symbol that's gotten drunk on its own meaning.
The symbols of the Mass are, minimally, the crucifix which "presides" over the liturgy; the processional cross; the altar flanked by candles; the Scriptures on display; the Eucharist vessels; and the priest. All of these "symbols joined together" represent violent couplings of images with meanings whose purpose is an inversion of human values, the subversion of our desire to dominate, and the reconciliation of worshippers with God and each other. Inversion, rejection, and reconciliation constitute the state of holiness. Our real values—youth, health, beauty, wealth, and strength—are so instinctive and enculturated, and sanctified by language and practice, that only the most outrageous symbols can challenge and perhaps reorder them. Each symbol of the Mass violates a fundamental human taboo, but the violation directs us to a new understanding of how to be human.
I'll begin with the most obvious symbol, the crucifix, beneath which the liturgy takes place. The cross with a corpus—the body of Christ—challenges us to behold a dead Savior, a kind of ultimate paradox. Some crucifixes represent Christ in agony, but the spear wound in his side indicates that he is dead. Can we conceive of anything more outrageous than kneeling to a corpse? The disgust and defiance we feel is precisely the point of the crucifix, which centers a corpse in our field of perception.
As an object that both is and isn't what it appears to be, the corpse is naturally among humankind's first symbols. In the corpse, the beloved is simultaneously present and absent; the body is a no-body, and we grieve because the absent one will never be present to us again. The conflation of absence and presence is the essence of a symbol, a clash of realities in an object that commands our attention, and this symbolic essence is most fully realized in a corpse.
However, a corpse is diachronic; that is, a corpse passes through time and so does its symbolic meaning. As the corpse decomposes, the face we loved turns into an object of terror or disgust as absence consumes presence. When a corpse diminishes to the utter anonymity of bones, it is no longer the beloved at all but an overarching symbol of death as an abstraction, like Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick. In a macabre parody of Diotima's ladder, the Many become One. The changing symbol is also reflected in our behaviors: When someone we love dies, we mourn and weep for the face we see but who can no longer see us. Then, we bury the corpse so we can't see it decay, and at some distant time, we dig up the skull, either to reflect on our mortality or to reach some anthropological conclusion.
In short, a corpse is diachronic; it passes through time.
A crucifix, on the other hand, is synchronic because it inhabits a particular slice of time into which and out of which the image qua image cannot pass; it represents Jesus in the moment immediately following his death. We see the unseeing eyes of the beloved and so find ourselves fixed in a state of perpetual mourning. As such, the crucifix perpetually evokes compassion (or should evoke compassion), or to put it in Aristotelian terms, the crucifix "engenders" pity and fear from those who behold it (but contra Aristotle doesn't purge them). We "beholders" are diachronic because we are passing through time, but the crucifix is static, which obviously doesn't mean the crucifix doesn't "do" something. Symbols are always dynamic and static at the same time, another clashing of antipathies. In their indeterminacy, symbols are paradoxical: present and absent, dynamic and static, synchronic in their stability and diachronic in their effects.
Furthermore, this paradox is driven deeper into our imaginations by the fact that any statue is like a corpse in that it both is and isn't the object represented. In the crucifix, we have paradoxical modes of being nested within each other, and we are invited into a consideration of these modes. The entrance into paradox is really an entrance into consciousness, inasmuch as consciousness is paradoxical. Like other works of art, the paradoxical "structure" of a crucifix leads us into a consideration of how consciousness works, rather like Keats' Grecian urn. Unlike other art, however, the crucifix insists that every relationship is at its heart ethical in the vein of Buber's I-Thou.
This is how Claude.ai put it, "If consciousness operates through the I-Thou relationship - where encountering the other makes us aware of ourselves as conscious beings - then every moment of awareness involves both self-preservation and ethical obligation to the other. But the crucifix makes this tension inescapable. Unlike other artworks that might allow aesthetic distance, the crucifix confronts us with suffering that demands response. It's synchronic in its immediate presence but diachronically it keeps generating the same ethical demand: '[We must] respond to suffering.'"
And that is one reason I'm Catholic. The central symbol is so potent that it not only imbues meaning in the other components of the Mass, but it also leads worshippers into the deepest consideration of how those meanings are generated through consciousness in its deepest structure.