Weather Report from Pastor Steven
The camera appeared in 1839. Its uses today are innumerable. Many aspects of photography are positive. I carry in my Bible a picture I took of my father and mother standing outside the country church of her childhood. Frayed and nibbled at the edges, they stand, proudly, in the autumn sunlight with large smiles perched across their faces.
Like most technology, the camera is limited. When looking through a camera, I see only what I expect to see. I look for the perfect position. Reciprocity diminishes as the distance between me and the subject increases. “This is what happens when we view something panoramically from a distance,” to borrow the words of Sallie McFague. Filtering everything through spectacles or a camera’s lens is a form of impressionism. Things only exist as I perceive them or they do not exist at all. Linear perspective was not Leonardo Da Vinci’s groundbreaking discovery. However, he was on to what we know to be the distant and controlling eye of the camera. To his students he said, “You must diminish the sharpness of those objects in proportion to their increasing distance from the eye of the spectator.”
Thankfully, there is another way of seeing. Annie Dillard describes the difference between the two ways of seeing as the difference between walking with and without a camera. “When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without the camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut.” The latter is to draw close and pay attention.
Advent begins this coming Sunday. The excesses of Thanksgiving may leave us a bit slow, our senses dulled. Our theme this year requires that we come prepared to return to our senses. We will employ the magnificent gift of sight as we note the colors and decorations of the season.To see Christmas purely, a return to the other senses is in order. Smell, touch and taste connect us to our physical surroundings. Hearing provides both distance and closeness. When all five are employed, the distance between the subject and the spectator diminishes.
Our theme this year is “Light the Light…Fire of Life.” Each Sunday we will light candles named hope, peace, joy, and love. On Christmas Eve, the Christ Candle will be set aglow against our world’s great darkness. Like candles, we seek a rekindling of the fire within us. We arrive atAdvent this year aware of a distinctively modern case of impressionism. A view that insists that things only exist as I see them or things do not exist at all. The tendency to filter everything through one’s own spectacles diminishes our common humanity. What one sees depends upon the stance from which one beholds this. This Christmas season, I invite you to find the stance in worship, either in person or via livestream, which best allows you to take in the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch of this hallowed time. Let us draw close, and experience again the message of Christmas: Unto you is born this day a Savior!
