Through the writing of Evangelically Departed I have been privileged to meet a number of other writers. Today I read a submission from Krysta Gibson who writes a newsletter called, “Living with Grace and Ease.” Krysta, who lives in the United States, opens by saying that when she went grocery shopping recently she chose the grocery store based on a consideration of where a mass shooting was less likely to happen. She wonders where such a fearful thought came from and goes on to mention that a physician in Vancouver once taught her to say some simple words when fearful thoughts intruded, “Cancel! Cancel! Love! Love!”
Words matter. In Christian faith, the world itself is spoken into being. God speaks creation. Jesus is known as the living Word. We tend to think, in our current cultural context, that images outweigh words, but it is good to be reminded that attentiveness to words can help heal our minds.
Two articles, both about photography, that I came across in the past few weeks speak to this realization. One, in the Guardian, is about a photographer who takes a lot of photos and video of murmurations of starlings. Søren Solkær says that, in taking such photos, he is hoping to capture a “fragment of eternity.”
The other article was in the New Yorker and it was about a photographer named Paolo Pellegrin. That article, by Ben Taub, is entitled, “In Search of the Sublime”. It is interesting to note that both articles are calling us towards a sense of the metaphysical, the spiritual. There is a sample of Pellegrin’s work in the article. In this case, it is a photo of a wildebeest, but the image is intentionally not clear. It is mostly motion. For Pellegrin, this captures the reality of the animal and the context more than a vivid still image could. The author of the article points out that there is similarity between Pellegrin’s wildebeest photo and ancient cave drawings of similar animals.
Pellegrin is quoted in the article saying that he feels photography is more about words than about images. This is because images convey a feeling or a word. Images say something.
There’s this Robert Capa (another photographer) quote—‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,’ ” he told me. “Very true! It always comes back to reducing or annulling distance. But that is only part of the equation. The other part is that if you’re not good enough, then you’re not reading enough. And the idea there is that photography is not actually about taking pictures—taking pictures is incidental. It’s a by-product, in a sense, of everything else. What you’re really doing is giving form—photographic form—to a thought, to an opinion, to an understanding of the world, of what is in front of you. And so if we think in these terms, then you have to improve the quality of your thoughts.
Hopeful Christian theology (as compared to damaging, fearful theology) has a view of creation that is different than that of much religious understanding. In hopeful Christian theology, creation is ongoing. It is not most important to figure out exactly how and why things started, but rather to recognize creation going on, continuing. In this hopeful Christian way of seeing things, the peak of creation is not some figuring out of the origin story of the universe. The peak of creation is the fullness of God in Jesus Christ, the One who emobodied self-giving love for all the world. There is no higher creation than that. It might be healing, then, to hear that Jesus is referred to as the Word, the living Word. He speaks and he is spoken.
Wherever you are at faith-wise, and wherever you are at in terms of coping, anxiety, emotion, uncertainty, joy or fear, I pray for you that you would know words that heal today. “Peace”, “Beauty”, “Love.”
If it helps to take in the scene of a murmuration of starlings (talk about beautiful words), then follow the link to the Guardian article. There really are ways in which images, and the words and meaning they are trying to convey, can calm our minds and show us life. As Pellegrin directs, perhaps we ought to improve the quality of our thoughts in order to see better.
This was a beautiful reflection. The continuation of nature and God is such a comfort.
Pelegrín makes an important observation…”we ought to improve the quality of our thoughts in order to see better”. How true. Our very health is determined by our thoughts. We can lead ourselves into peace or into the depths of despair by our thoughts.
Photography can be a wonderful tool to help us “see”. With a camera we can “see” a new perspective or uncover something “unseen” by others. A camera can highlight a thing of beauty lost in a sea of ordinary. A camera can capture an image that gifts us with a lifetime memory.
Our eyes can become the “camera” that captures “Peace”, “Beauty” ,“Love”.