The importance of symbol

Sometimes I'll experience something, like a talk or a book or a movie that takes me several days and maybe even weeks to digest. It will come up often in conversation and shift the way I view things. I can even revisit it years later and digest parts of it that I was incapable of digesting at the time I initially experienced it. David recently sent me such a talk. It's a talk by Kathleen Flake that she gave at a gathering of Mormon counselors and therapists and it's called "Facilitating Change Through Symbols". Kathleen is brilliant. Her background is in law. She was a litigation attorney in DC and then retired from that and got a doctorate in American religious studies and now teaches at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.

I kind of don't want to sum up the talk, because I think you need to experience it for yourself. I am embedding the audio file so that you can do that. I realize though, that many won't listen, so there are some things that I would like share that I loved from the talk.

I love what Kathleen opens up. I love what she doesn’t say. I also like what she does say, but I love how she chooses to be vague on certain things. One of the main thrusts of the talk is that the gospel is full of symbol and that we often try to explain these symbols as though we know definitively what they mean, when really we are using language that isn't able to come anywhere close to accurately explaining what symbols mean. At the same time, we kind of have to do that. That's part of why we're here. To learn and grow and understand, and therefore hopefully one day become.

One large, general example of this is the plan of salvation. We think we have this all nailed down. We have flowcharts with circles and arrows and weird terms like "pre-earth life" and "spirit prison" and "kingdoms". We've got it all very well laid out and explained. Ask any Mormon to give you a run down of the plan of salvation and you will get the very specific and correlated run down. And it's a good place to start. We have to define it somehow, right? And we are human and need to use our own limited language to explain and attempt to understand eternal things. Fred's things. (That joke will make sense after you listen to the talk.) What holds us back is when we sit back and allow ourselves to think that we have sufficiently and effectively explained the plan of salvation and that there's nothing more to it. All our flowcharts and words and definitions are but a small, small shadow of what the "plan of salvation" really is.

Kathleen says that one of the reasons that she loves the temple is because there is no one there telling her what things mean, like what happens at church. There is a lot of symbolism in the temple and the ceremonies performed there. We say that we don't talk specifically about temple ceremonies not because they are secret, but because they are sacred. Kathleen takes it a step further and says maybe it's because we would shut down the capacity the symbolism has to teach us. We would limit our own potential for understanding.

This is just one of the powerful themes in her talk. I'll let you discover some of the others.