On Symbols
Have you ever had a moment when a realization doesn’t arrive all at once, but slowly seeps in? Some might call it an epiphany, depending on how grand it feels. This was quieter than that. Still, it stayed with me.
Not long ago, I was sitting in a church, listening to a choir. I was on the second floor, front and center. A large cross stood directly in front of me—anchoring the space, unmistakable, meant to be seen. I had seen it before, many times. But this time, I didn’t just see it. I felt it.
Not the object itself, but the symbol.
In that moment, I was flooded with a realization about what symbols are and what they do to us. I couldn’t narrow down what the cross meant—if anything, I realized the opposite. That the cross means many things to many people. Suffering. Hope. Sacrifice. Redemption. Memory. Belonging. Resistance. Comfort. Grief. Faith. Doubt.
All at once, and never fully the same.
It’s hard to explain, but in that moment I understood the power of a symbol—not as something to be interpreted correctly, but as something that works on us. Something that reaches us before we have words.
I study communication and have long been interested in signs and semiotics. But through my early encounters with Jungian thought, something clicked. Jung distinguished between signs and symbols in a way that suddenly felt embodied rather than theoretical. A sign can be explained. It points to one thing. A symbol cannot be exhausted by explanation. Once it can be fully grasped intellectually, it stops being a symbol and becomes a sign.
From this perspective, symbols arise when the psyche is trying to express experiences that exceed logic—existential questions, spiritual longing, encounters with suffering or meaning. They emerge where language falls short.
What struck me most was not what the cross meant, but that I didn’t need to decide. The symbol did not demand interpretation. It invited relationship.
And maybe that’s the quiet truth about symbols: they often guide us not by giving answers, but by giving us something to stand before when answers fail. They offer orientation when certainty dissolves. They give shape to the unknown.
If symbols are part of the individuation process—as Jung suggests—then meaning is not something we manufacture alone. It is something that meets us, sometimes unexpectedly, asking only that we remain open to being affected.
