day 24: revelation

In my beginning, when I was nought,

you called my name

as if I were already there

-------------------------------------Let there be Moon!

And I was...Moon?

-------------------------Moon.

I have counted the years as I spin around the earth around the sun

as a tree also counts its life in circles, laying down the rings.

And the years have been long enough only to begin

the study of my craft, the art you gave me at birth:

how to bless the earth with moonlight

Now, on this night of your birth,

we meet for the first time face to face, Moon and human,

and I (entering above the half-door of the stable,

praising the hollow of Mary’s arm, the pool of shadows

round the manger, and touching

lightly your head)

now render back to you, as you begin from nought,

and lay down at your feet

your gift to me of moonlight.

‘Song of the Moon’

Barbara Colbrook Peace

I am drawn to high contrast scenes in the play of light and shadow in both my photography and my visual art.  I often find myself pushing to boost the contrast more and more in the images I make.  I treat this as a technical struggle but I realise this is actually masquerading an emotional tussle.  

Ironically, I want to communicate emotion in my images and yet I am notoriously poor at naming emotion within myself.  And I am particularly inarticulate about connecting my head and my heart in the moment of creation - so how can I possibly consecrate this moment with camera or brush?

I am searching for a revelation. 

How can I communicate what it is I feel in any given moment through a purely visual medium?  

I long for the clarity of a high contrast scene where I can isolate my shadows and deal with them accordingly.

However, as I grow more interested in who God might be, I increasingly see that there is more and more complexity and ambiguity in this practice of being present before my Maker.  This is not what I took the searing desert light of the Old Testament prophets to indicate.

Increasingly revelation is muddied, unclear, indistinct.  There is so much I just cannot work out how to see.  The presence of the Light is absolutely there in this dark bruised grey blue Advent half-light before me this December day - but God just does not look the way I thought God ought to look.  Even in the brightest of places I cannot see anything.

Perhaps this is the beginning of beholding the Not-I.

When you recognise her beauty,

the eye applauds, the heart stands in an ovation,

and the tongue when she is near

is on its best behaviour,

it speaks more like light.

What does light talk about?

I asked a plant that once.

It said "I am not sure,

but it makes me

grow.”

'What does light talk about?'

St Thomas Aquinas/Daniel Ladinsky

wringing out the light. iPhone image.