Photography and Spirituality

I love dabbling in photography. I love taking photos of nature scenes and of important occasions. I love putting my photos together and weaving a story out of them, or doing a reflective video or photo essay from them. I am thrilled when I come up with a serendipitous shot and I am able to capture more details than I intended to – like a beautiful cloud formation in a panoramic landscape shot or a bird in flight streaking across a scenic sunset.

With developments in technology, man is able to see more than what the naked human eyes can see. With telephoto and zoom lenses, things that are too big or too far to see become visible in magnificent pictures. With macro lenses and electron microscopes, things and creatures that are too tiny to see are made visible in amazing ways to human eyes. With time-lapse photography, the unfolding of life in nature and in the universe is dramatically captured, like the blossoming of leaves and flowers. With high-speed photography, what is too fast for the human eyes to catch can become an wondrous experience to behold, like the flapping of the wings of a bird in flight or a shooting star streaking across the night skies.

There is more to life than can be perceived by our senses. There are sights wonderful to behold that our eyes cannot catch. There are sounds that sing hymns to the universe that our ears cannot even strain to hear. The human tongue can distinguish millions of different tastes and yet we have names for probably less than a hundred of these. There are sensations we feel which we cannot even begin to describe with words. There are many things and persons that touch our lives that we are not even aware of.

And so it is with our experience of the Divine. We fly to the heights of the biggest things and we find Him there. We go deep into the smallest of things and He is there. We find joy in the company of loved ones, only to realize that He made that possible. Often, His presence is so overwhelming I find myself wondering whether this all too good to be true. In faith and in prayer, I affirm it is indeed good and true and oh so beautiful. He promised to be with us and He is.

The Lord remembers his covenant for ever.

So the Jews said to him, “Who do you make yourself out to be?”
Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is worth nothing;
but it is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’
You do not know him, but I know him.
And if I should say that I do not know him, I would be like you a liar.
But I do know him and I keep his word.
Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad.”
So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?”
Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you,before Abraham came to be, I AM.”
John 8:51-59