Using my camera most days has taught me how to pay attention. Or perhaps in this case, it is the flower that breaks through the usual inner preoccupations and insists on being noticed. Either way I continue to reflect on the practice of photography and the practice of contemplation, the link between gazing at the world around and prayer as seeking God wherever God may be found.
Once we move away from prayer as words, and ideas, and therefore a kind of saying and hearing, we can begin to think instead of prayer as seeking, and seeking to see.
Take this rose, the last autumn rose at the bottom of our garden, whose beauty drew me out one near dawn to photograph it in the early morning sunlight that touches this part of the garden for a short time. The coincidence of light and colour, the petals joined in harmony without symmetry, but nevertheless held together in a fittingness that cannot be improved.
This rose is not an argument for God, like a sophisticated argument from design. But it is an intimation of transcendence, a reminder of beauty as a summons, and the fragrance of goodness as a gift. I now look at this photo, and image minus the smell, detached from the cold early breeze of a particular morning, captive in the digital stillness of an image, unable to float in the slow dance of sprung movement. But looking at it now, in my memory I am acknowledging that moment of mutual presence of flower to human mind in a living encounter in a garden. And perhaps that is argument enough for that humbling of mind and recall of inner attention that begins as contemplative waiting and ends as gratitude, and therefore prayer.
Prayer can sometimes become captive to our dependence on words to convey meaning, words as freight carriers of our ideas, desires, fears and so much else that sits in our mind like the familiar furniture of home. Paying attention to that which is not us, looking outward to the life of the world beyond my ego, outside of my concerns, in the otherness of all that is not me, is an exercise in horizon stretching, or a disciplining of self to focus on that which is other, and which if I pay attention has much to say, and much to be seen.
In an age when novelty and newness in experience are craved, and living in a culture of immediacy and instancy of gratification, such patient noticing of that which is not me can, paradoxically, be self-preserving. Instead of the exhausted and dissipated self, driven to distraction and focused on self creation and self-image making, that inner core of who we are paying atttention to that which is there but unnoticed, is like that encounter with a rose in morning light, helping us see, and giving us time to retrain our affections outwardly and towards others.
That rose, and the time to take a good photo, offers an encounter with life in all its beauty and transience, its harmony and difference, and the minutes taken to pay such reverent attention are important interludes in an otherwise selfish life. Jesus knew this. That's why he warned that whoever saves their life will lose it; but whoever loses their life for my sake and the Gospel's will find it.
The simple, yet complex act of taking a photo, can be a rehearsal for something deeper, a developing of the soul outwards to see the movements and consequences of God's creative masterpiece, of which we may be a significant brush-stroke.
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