The Main Sign

One of the most important reasons to develop aesthetic logic is so that we can read signs. If we can’t read, we can’t know, and therefore we can’t act. 

Imagine getting turned around driving because you can’t read the street sign (this happens to me often). “Where am I?” you ask. Out comes the GPS and the map. You look at secondary signs because the main sign was obscured. 

The problem is that we tend not to know which sign is the main one, or even that it is a sign. Which is the main sign? “Know thyself,” Socrates said. A faulty reading of ourselves as human persons is perhaps the worst sort of getting lost. Misreading ourselves, we then also misinterpret the secondary signs (science, nature, law, politics).

Jesus corrects this misreading of ourselves. We look to him as a human sign, a sign of what God stamped on us all: we have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge, in the image of its Creator. (Colossians 3:10) 

Have I read myself as a sign lately? Through the lens of Jesus, the main sign? How might that change my direction?

Renew my knowledge of myself, and guide me to the right road. Amen.

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ON SIGNS and secondary signs, see St. John of Damascus, "On the Divine Images."

SLOW DOWN and read the signs of self and identity, humor and redemption of brothers, as you travel the road by tractor with the intriguing and unusual main character of "The Straight Story."