Several years ago I was taking a class in preparation for confirmation into the Episcopal Church when we entered into the inevitable question as to whether Christ is in some mysterious way really present in the eucharistic elements, of if instead the bread and wine are only symbols. I started to think, and still think, how odd it is to prefix the "symbols" with "only." As though we're thinking "Alas, the Lord isn't really here; it's merely a symbol!" Suppose you're summoned to the telephone: "It's for you; it's Bill Clinton!" but you petulantly respond "So what? He's not really there...He's just on the phone...After all, those tinny sounds out of the phone merely represent the president!" That would be a strange way to see things, but sometimes it's the way we see symbols. How alienated we must be from the realities of this universe if it's easy to say "It's only a symbol, not the thing itself but just something else standing for it."

Iris Murdoch, in her play Above the Gods, has Plato say "one thing can stand for another, that's as deep as what's deepest. People have always known this." Maybe so, but it's easy to forget the import of the fact that we make our home in a semantically deep universe, one in which things don't keep to themselves. Things mean; they point toward what is other than and beyond themselves, thinking of, speaking of, referring to, denoting, exemplifying, representing, symbolizing: one way or another standing in for what is absent and yet, just because of this standing in, present. A world of meanings is a world of vicarious realities.

How it's possible for one thing to mean another is a foundational philosophical problem - some would say it's the philosophical problem. How can ideas (whether they are bits of brain or modes of immaterial substance), or sounds, or marks on paper reach beyond themselves and grasp what's 'out there?' What makes my idea of a tangerine an idea of a tangerine? How do we represent what is elsewhere, or nowhere? How can there possibly be such a thing as intentionality, subjectivity, consciousness, mind, a self, us? The question of what we are is part of the mystery of meaning. But we're not the whole of it.

There's meaning in the world, but there's a sense in which meanings make it. The world isn't ready-made. It's not a 'given,' pre-packaged world. It is by way of our symbol making and symbol using that we sort things into a world. Without a rich, complex and subtle scheme of interrelated symbols I can make no sense of the simple question "How many things are there in this room?" I need symbols, a frame of concepts, kinds, and categories before I can say what's there. There's no world worth talking about until some things stand in for other things. Worldmaking and symbolmaking happen together.

The activity of making and using symbols lies near the center of the forms of life that express our humanness. Symbolizing with the world's perceptual materials, artists add to the world, reshape and enrich it. Configurations of stone and steel, paint, motions, sounds, words are complex symbols (often themselves formed of further symbols) that represent what is, or what could be, or even what could not be, to give us insight and enlightenment that draws us deeper into grateful participation in what is. They add to the world's store of meanings, deepening it by adding new layers of representation that supervene upon the levels of meaning already there.

Consider the symbolizing activity that constitutes Christian worship. We symbolically re-inact God's mighty acts on our behalf: creation and salvation. By singing, speaking, gesturing, kneeling, standing and sharing the sacraments we link our stories with God's story. We represent God's free, unconditional and unexpected acceptance of us, and our response to him, with our liturgical representations. Without these ways of meaning we would not remember our God and Savior, not as the community that is his body. Symbols make apparent the past, present and future of God's grace.

It is tempting to connect the ways we mean in worship to what we represent there. We recall the weakness and humiliation of Christ on the cross because his being there is the ultimate vicarious reality. There he takes our place, representing us in the place of judgment and abandonment. When he defeated the powers of evil and returned from death it was, again, one man taking the place of all. Because he was there his goodness is counted as ours. Thus the primary Reformation teaching of 'imputed righteousness:' Jesus Christ standing in for us. One taking the place of all there at the center of all things.

By way of symbols we grasp reality and reality grasps us. So what should I have said about the Eucharist? Is Jesus Christ really there? It is hard to take seriously the dichotomy between really being there and symbolically being there. Only a misapprehension of the role and reality of symbols forces us to choose between St. Thomas' implausible metaphysics and a Zwinglian "merely a symbol." On reflection being there symbolically looks less like the opposite of really being present and more like a way of being present. A way that reflects the reality of this universe and its Creator's way with it. So I'd answer: "Yes: symbolized in the wine and bread."