Good symbols create ripples. They get you musing and making unexpected connections. They are apparently superficial but quickly draw attention to the foundations.
Pope Francis' Holy Thursday expedition to the juvenile justice centre to wash the feet of young people, male and female, Christian and Muslim, was a case in point. It was a symbol of pastoral outreach to the disadvantaged outside the Catholic community, but it also prompted discussion about the place of law in church and society.
This reflection is much needed in Australia today.
Catholics have often seen rules about liturgy and other aspects of Catholic life as sacred in the sense that they are unalterably binding. And although the laws of the state may be bent to fit self-interest, many Australians also see them as sacred and not to be broken under any pretext. The mythical cavalier Australian approach to law and rules in our day is just a myth. Those who break laws for whatever reason are inordinately blamed.
That is evident in the common Australian attitude to asylum seekers. Although they have arrived legally in Australia to claim protection, they have only to be described as illegals to lose any support they had.
It is now also rare for idealistic people to commit such symbolic breaches of the law as trespassing on military bases in order to proclaim the injustice of Australian military ventures. For most Australians it is enough to hear that they have broken a law passed by Parliament to condemn them and their action without further reflection.
Missing in these approaches to law is the recognition that rules and laws serve a higher purpose.
They shape an order that protects human flourishing. The flourishing of persons in their relationships to others and as a society and to the world is what matters most deeply. In the language of Catholic canon law, 'in the Church the salvation of souls must always be the supreme law'. The reason for state laws, too, is to create a space within which human beings can reach their human potential in a way that enhances all people.
This means that rules are to be obeyed not simply because they are enacted legally, but because they support human flourishing.
For this reason they may allow explicit exceptions, and courts will allow room for implicit exceptions. Police and ambulance drivers for example, are entitled to disregard traffic laws when lives are at risk, provided they can do so safely. Any citizen would justifiably do the same if their child's life was at stake, again providing it was safe.
And if people were threatened with death in their own nation, it would be right for them to seek protection in another country whatever the laws of that nation prescribed.
Similarly when Pope Francis breached liturgical rules on Holy Thursday he was right to do so. Not because popes make the laws, and so can break them, but because the self-respect of the young prisoners (the salvation of souls) was at stake. In the same circumstances any celebrant would rightly do as the Pope did.
Because laws and rules exist to make space for human beings to flourish, we have a responsibility to challenge government laws and actions that we judge to be seriously detrimental to human flourishing. Such symbolic and peaceful breaches of the law as stepping over the boundaries of military bases and chaining oneself to trees are a way of drawing attention to the perceived wrong of military actions and environmental destruction.
Those reviled as lawbreakers in their own time are often retrospectively honoured as custodians of the national conscience. They are both hated and applauded because their actions impelled people to ponder what is right.
Of course there is a cost to human flourishing when laws are broken. As a canon lawyer said of Pope Francis' action, it can diminish respect for the law. Instead of prompting people to ask about what is right, it can encourage them to believe that the law is to be obeyed only when it is in one's own interests.
That is why the virtuous context of conscientious law breaking is so important: its insistence on what matters, its peacefulness and its respect for those who administer the law.
Both church and state laws are securely grounded when there is a shared sense of the importance of human flourishing. When this is absent, manipulation of the law out of self-interest, vindictive attitudes to wrongdoers and servile adherence to rules flourish. These apparently incompatible pathologies have a common root: a lack of respect for the values that law serves.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street. Image: Catholic Herald