symbolism, healing(s)

I'm a bad blogger this year.

Anyway, I've been thinking some tonight about symbolism, especially bad symbolism, especially bad symbolism applied to people. Here's what I mean: I go out to lunch with a friend, and see that they order terrible food and terrible drinks. By terrible I mean unhealthy (or worse, unappetizing). When I see this, I take that example of an unhealthy choice and decide that they are an unhealthy person. Or, my friends come to my house, to my room, and see that my room is messy, and deduce that my life is also disordered. These are all issues of symbolism. Actually, there's a fancier word for it (metonymy?) for making the part stand for the whole, but I think that even then, it's still a case of symbolism. Or, I argue, an inappropriate use of symbolism as well as an inability to really see a person from multiple angles. It's a simplification for the sake of convenience. Not that I've seen examples of that recently, but I've seen them in the past, and thought about it tonight for some reason. Other cases of bad symbolism: "what bugs you the most about other people are the problems you see in yourself." Sure, in some cases this is true, and in other cases it's completely the reverse. Bad psychology = bad symbolism.

Recently, I've also been thinking about Jesus' miracles, and their connections to the identities of those being healed. Just off of memory, when Jesus healed people, he healed them of chronic conditions. There is an instance or two of fever, but fever is a temporary condition, and most of them were chronic: blindness, leprosy, death, deafness. Additionally, many of these things have to do with the inability to connect fully to the physical world. I argue that Jesus' healings, then, involved significantly altering identity and reconnecting people to their senses and therefore to their ability to connect to the physical world. When the leper is healed, he is no longer a leper. When the dead come back to life, they are living, they can no longer be referred to in the ways they were referred to in the past.

In other news, this year has been a time when it's really hit home to me that I generally assume that people dislike me or resent me. Or, I assume that people don't like what I produce, and sometimes don't believe them when they say the opposite. I don't think this is healthy, and I don't think that I should care.