New Perspectives

‎"Once you label me you negate me."
Søren Kierkegaard

Exactly. I just become a semiotic device in your thinking. All that I am becomes merely a sign within your thinking. In your interaction with me actually you will not be interacting with me, you will be interacting not with the full me but the symbol that I now am for you. 

This is exactly why Peter Rollins, the author of How (Not) to Speak of God,  talks about adopting atheism for lent. To allow for the sign that God may have become in my mind to be replaced by the living and active presence of God. 

Signs certainly have many purposes but you can never have a dynamic relationship with a sign. It merely points to something.

Anytime a human or a being becomes a sign for me, at that point the life is drained out of them and they have become a marker for what they represent in my mind. 

Which needless to say minimizes or shuts down any the beauty of the interaction with a human being because the interaction is with a semiotic device in my brain. 

What signs might you become in my mind? Old human, young human, smart human, crazy human, black human, white human, male human, female, intellectual, uneducated, pretty, engineer, day laborer,... you get the point. 

Love means I care enough to notice when I am assigning (good word here ;~) a place holder or sign in place of the living and dynamic reality that is you. 

We all do it, it's the way the brain functions. Our brains always seem to want to assign meaning to what we see and conceptualize "what it is." 

Signs and labels kills the person and closes the latches on a small box with a rounded top and gilded hinges. 

Love creates an opening of an unknown size where the other person can become fully alive in the relationship and actually according to Carl Rodgers the aliveness enabled can show up in every part of the person's life.