The Camera as Prayer Book: 1. An Important Inner Adjustment of Focus

Over the summer I've been intentional about beauty. What I mean is I have tried to remember to pay attention to what is there. But how do you become more attentive just because you want to, especially when there is so much else inward and outward that dissipates attention and energy and purpose? The decision to notice the beauty around me is only really made if I do, indeed, if I do in thought and deed, go looking for beauty; or if I at least learn to recognise the presence of beauty at the periphery of my vision, and take time to draw it towards the centre of my attention.

One way is to change my inner priorites of thought. I suspect that is at the heart of what Jesus meant when he said "Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you." If life is in focus, other things become clear. If one thing is made ultimate, everything else becomes penultimate. Seek means to pursue with determination and strategy; it means to desire and therefore to recognise the good that awakens such desire; it means to set a goal and harness energy, time and effort to reach it. Each of these is a way of describing what could be a fruitful expression of prayerfulness. Seeking, desiring,purposing that which is worth our attention and worthy of our affection.

Beauty is one of the inherent gifts of creation, when God's fingerprints are detected all over those moments of encounter with beauty that we all experience now and again. For some time now my camera has become a sort of prayer book, as image replaces word and a photo becomes a moment of wonder. In that moment of framing and analysis, something takes place which is contemplative and tugs at those surprisingly persistent longings that come from God knows where. And God does know where such longing originates, and at our best so do we.

"Seek you first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness..." is one of those words of Jesus that upsets our multi-tasking obsessions. You can't be singleminded and multitask, and in any case we all know that we are being short-changed when someone is talking to us and doing several other things at the same time.

"Seek first..." And yes, I realise this saying of Jesus is about ultimate commitment relativising all other commitments, and that Jesus had in mind more than a small and partial inner adjustment of focus. But the principle is the same, a realigning of priorities, a reorientation of our affections around that which is worth noticing and attending to.

 

So over the summer I have been seeking beauty that compensates for much that is ugly in our world, in our cultural environment, in our social ecology. I've been looking for hints of transcendence, correctives to cynicism, reminders of our "responsibility to awe", tonics for jaded hopefulness, sources of energy to convert carelessness back to care, currents of thermal uplift that give vision beyond limited horizons. Such responses are made possible by the simple and complex act of taking a photo. Above are three examples of such thermal uplifts, captured moments of hopefulness, the promise and return of playfulness in a life often taken far too seriously.

Comments

[JasonGoroncy]

For a theologian today to draw attention to beauty is a kind of protest about things as they seem, and an act of hope for what will be – that 'the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea', etc. Thank you Jim for your attending to such things.

[Elaine Wilson]

Thank you Jim for this. It is not easy for someone with an idea of the aesthetic to survive in an evangelical setting. Beauty is the air that most artists breathe and at times I have felt suffocated by the lack of attention given to this very subject. Having to find food for the soul in other areas outwit the evangelical sphere. Another book on the subject that I found helpful is Roger Scrutons little book "Beauty"