Seeing past the signs

So over the past few weeks, I've been meeting with a few friends to discuss the book "Letters to a Young Catholic." I highly recommend this book to anyone, whether it be a person of the faith or a curious bystander who wants to know more...the book goes very much into depth in different locations where the Catholic faith has taken prominence or has importance. These locations range from a monastery, a shrine, a pub, a neighborhood in Baltimore, MD, and more. Through the locations, the author George Weigel dives into spiritual subjects, using the different areas and the people who have lived in them to describe complex, deep ideas. So far, the book is nothing short of wonderful.

Last night, we were talking about the pub and got on the subject of signs. Before I go into signs, it would be helpful to give a little analogy. Think of a road sign that you see on the highway. The sign is signaling you to keep moving forward towards the end goal, and when we are in a car we generally use that to guide our way. However, we as people don't usually follow signs that we see in life that way. Take, for example, beauty. Beauty is something that people look at and revel in. But beauty...whether it is in nature, in people, in art, in music...beauty is something that is meant to bring us closer to God. It is a "sign" that is showing us towards God and what He has created for us. However, so many times we cut ourselves short and stay at the sign, thinking that just reaching that point is enough. Through the media and general outlook of signs, it is easy to get caught up in the crowd and simply stop short of the destination...to stunt our progress from what we really ought to be seeing.

There is a beautiful story that I think really describes this well. In the early Christian Church, several bishops were gathered outside a cathedral in Antioch, when a beautiful prostitute passed by on the street. Upon noticing her, the crowd of bishops looked away to avoid being seduced. Bishop Nonnus, however, stared intently at her, and then said to his fellow bishops, "Did not the wonderful beauty of that woman delight you?" The bishops remained silent. Nonnus insisted, "Indeed it delighted me," but he wept for her. When the prostitute saw how the bishop looked at her, she was caught off guard. No man had ever looked at her with such purity. He was not lusting after her, but rather saw something in her that she did not even see in herself. The simple purity of that one bishop's glance marked the beginning of her conversion to Christ. She soon returned to find him, and today, we know this former prostitute as St. Pelegia.

Bishop Nonnus saw past the sign to the destination. We all see signs in our life, some that easily point to God, and some that don't seem to point to God at all. It is in the ones in where we don't see God that require us to rethink, revisit, and assess how it DOES lead to Him. I know in my life, I have seen signs that don't require any second guessing as to where God is: education, nature, food, friendship, family, my relationship. But there are other parts of my life where I desperately need to connect the dots and see past the signs for what it is here on earth. Keep the signs of this world in the rearview, and allow the light of God to shine the way into eternal life.