In my days we had fun with the puzzle: we spent hours composing the different tiles, so as to gradually build a beautiful picture that was drawn on the box. The secret was all in the right choice, especially in the beginning, of the joints in order to be recognized among a thousand, the card that best matched the one already placed on the table. If you miss the box with the image, you will never finish the puzzle. The same happens if you miss even one piece. Indeed the mosaics were sophisticated puzzles.

The symbol is like a puzzle: each element acquires its meaning from the collection and considering what is near it. For this reason, symbol means "to put together". The piece, taken by itself, means nothing: it takes consistency and a sense only if it is part of a complete picture. The liturgy is the attempt to compose, with an infinite number of tiles, the puzzle resize the face of Christ. However, it has a special power: Christ himself leads us in building the image. He is the builder and, simultaneously, the depicted image. And each of those celebrating the sacrament is a fragment which comprises both the Christ the manufacturer, the operator, "the bidder", we would say, and the face of Christ's final. Each symbol in the liturgy makes sense "for Christ, with Christ and in Christ."

The Church (Christus totus, Augustine would say, while St. Paul prefers to use the image of the limbs and the head of the body) is the one within which the symbol takes consistency. First of all because it has "passed" the meanings through what we call "tradition". Then because it teaches us and tells us how to build the puzzle. To dial it in fact assumes that someone has already fixed the image to be built and the rules of the game. If everyone puts his card in case, it will be a terrible chaos. It would not be enough to say with pride: "I put how I felt to put" to create harmony. It is no coincidence that 'devil' is in the meaning of the word, the opposite of the symbol: "dia-ballo" in greek means divide. The divisor is the one that shatters smithereens the unity of the symbol, which is based on communion, that is, sharing the received gift.

That is the symbol in the liturgy is never invented, it is received. It is true that the final image can be ancient or modern, changing with the times and express what matters to the sensitivity of those who buy the puzzle to build. But the fact remains that it is a common task, is based on the agreement of composing that image. There is a shared feeling, a sort of prior agreement and a teamwork. And then the same symbol, because it received, helps to give to the community a common language. It therefore acts in both directions.

But our whole life, individual and personal, is a puzzle. If a company, a community, a cluster of people do not have a common language (which does not mean approved, repeating word for word the same things, but it implies a shared code), it breaks and you do not understand most (and so the "divisor"). In our Western societies feel increasingly the disintegration that comes from not knowing how to talk, from having given up trying together, becoming a "symbol". And we have theorized this exalting the utmost creativity and individual freedom. The result is that we don’t understand more and we don’t find reasons for a common commitment in the name of shared ideals, beyond individual differences, psychologies and ideas.
Social life is made of endless liturgies, each with its own symbols: the shopping, the stadium, the consultation with the magician in turn, the fashion, everything is done through objects and behaviors that buy the full sense only and exclusively in that context. They may exist outside of it, but then they are "symbol" of something else, which in turn will depend on the context in which it resides. If at a spiritism setting the table doesn’t begin to jerk, it is said: it is not working, let’s try why. And if one of the presents say: but I would not touch my hand with his neighbor, is not that everyone looking at him, praising his spirit of initiative; if anything, he is reproached for not following the rules, that is for having destroyed the symbol.

For Christians, the first symbol is the same community that celebrates herself. Viewing horizontally, it feels united around the symbol, evoked by the common symbol, through a feeling that in part receives and in part creates herself. If the community is dispersed, that is, in practice, if the church is empty, it remains only the expert who knows and shares the received symbols, but there is no sharing. At the same time a person is recognized as part of a community because and how he has a part to the common symbols. We see a person going to the mosque and praying and we say: he is a Muslim. The symbol is therefore a strong identity, both for those who experience it, both for those who see it and places it outside. That is why those calls "a Christian without a church" loses a primary symbolic dimension that is part of their awareness of belonging.

If those who are celebrating the symbol constantly invents what he seems to have to express a truth that at heart, there is no more a symbol, because it is less "with" ("syn", in greek) and "bolos "(from the greek "ballo", which means "to throw"). Who throws the dice on its own, is the second part of what the word expresses, that is "throwing" but not "throw together". This means that the liturgy presupposes a common language and also, in large part, shared ways of expressing life. The liturgy is "celebrating", not "creating". To create there is place elsewhere. I also believe to be the masters of the "symbol", that is, the inventors, it means the exchange service celebrated with teaching. So why we use the symbol, and not simply we explain a concept? In fact we have often filled with explanations of the liturgy.

The more you feel the need to "comment", not the symbol speaks for itself, recognized as part of the common language of all. The homily is not a speech as it could be a lesson or a plea: it is part of the symbol and, rather than stop it, it helps to get inside. Otherwise disturb the symbol, not the building. Say, at the end of the homily, "and now back to our common prayer" means to reveal how those who have helped to distract from the symbol, rather than to serve it, that is the community that celebrates it. For this is the homily, alas!, should be mystagogy, that is a hand offered from inside the symbol to help entering into the symbol

To believe we being the creators, the owners, the inventors of the symbol is to create a new clericalism: that of someone who "knows" what must pass the new Gnostics: in front of him is the masses to be indoctrinated. But if so, the origin of the symbol would be the helpers to evoke. But is the community that puts the symbol, and the ministers are the servants of the common symbol. If therefore the community "receives" the symbol and celebrates it, the reception will become much easier, as the object or gesture that feeds the symbol is seen by all as part of common experience. Bread, wine, oil, spousal love, authority and service, sense of sin and forgiveness - to do the examples of incorporation of the symbols which we call "sacraments" (actually a "symbol" is the greek way, along with another word now difficult to understand, the "mystery", to say what in Latin is translated as "sacrament") - should be full-bodied part of everyone's life, to be maximally expressive.

If everyone sees the bread rising in the field, becoming the ear, be harvested, processed into flour, then dough, if everyone connects it with the fragrance of cooking, feel it soft, seeing it broken together around a common table, the symbol of bread will receive, from the human point of view, the fullness of its meaning as a "symbol", that is shared expression. Then all the symbolic meanings, of course, resulting (the smell that came out, the breaking as stress and sharing, the enhanced units) will be naturally evoked.

In our society where the bread is encountered sporadically, as a poor brother of the bread sticks and crackers, where a young man has seldom seen a wheat field, rarely gets up so early (perhaps because he comes home so late) to smell the oven’s perfume, when everyone eats at home on his own and breaks "his" bread, the evocative value of the symbol will become less immediate and shared. But we do not get our hopes which, explaining, the bread recovers his sense. The mind, in fact, is only part of experiencing the reality and by itself it is not sufficient to evoke it. The mind suggests to the heart that evokes. The same can be said, in a different way, of the other symbols.

This horizontal dimension of the symbol is added to the vertical: the action of the wind’s puff, of God’s breath, that is the Holy Spirit, that "metabolizes", as the ancients said, that object and gesture, and there grants "from the top" the spiritual fullness of the symbol: when the priest, before pronouncing the words of institution with the same words spoken by Jesus on the bread and wine, extends his hands, makes a gesture that is called "epicletic" : invokes by God the gift that is always new to do "full" the symbol that is capable of offering the fragrance, sharing, and even the same body and blood, ie, the person of Christ.
This part is, from the human point of view, less problematic than the first, because it corresponds to the promise of God's faithfulness, even in the drop of wine and bread’s crumb that a priest brings in the hollow of his hand when he celebrates in secret in a concentration camp, this ensures his presence when Christ will return and will invite us to the fullness of the symbol that we will only see in the "face-to-face "of the heavenly banquet.

We have focused thus on the human symbol, with particular reference to the liturgy, because the problems develop not from the permanent outpouring of the Spirit (this will require, if anything, the problem of believing or not believing), but from our ability to be those who are part of the symbol, not "include" it as our possession, but welcome it, bringing own individual sensitivity, but also accepting with gratitude what the Church from the beginning gives us, as participation in the "mystery" of God. That includes us in his language and asks us to share (not invented), but also takes every time our language, so that the symbol does not end in the celebration, but welcome and "metabolize" our whole life.

Let us therefore take the wings of the symbol to find God, without wanting to "close" Him in the symbol’s object, thinking first of all to "capture" to bring it to life, but thank him for His giving us in the symbol. It is God who gently catch us in the symbol and makes of our lives a valuable card in the puzzle of his Kingdom.

Mons. Claudio Gugerotti
Nunzio Apostolico
nuntius@vatican.ge