Captured Moments

Recently as I was driving in the late afternoon, the sky caught my attention, as is often the case.  The ceiling-like cloud formation just ahead, with a tiny pin-point of the sun shining through, spoke to me of a "sip of spirit."  I envisioned the scene as a photograph.

Then I remembered photographs which I had encountered in retreat experiences and the power of those photographs to open the mind to insight in both the outer and inner world and to break into the heart to tap emotion that might be lying dormant but nevertheles present.  Capturing that sip of spirit in the moment was to me like a photograph.  The thought came that pondering a photographic image is like being present in the moment.

A photographer friend once explained to me her criteria for distinguishing a photograph from a picture.  Any image can be a picture, she explained, but a photograph catches the extraordinary element of an ordinary image.

We have the extraordinary in the ordinary all the time and everywhere and we often miss it, along with the messages it offers, because we are "somewhere else."  We are not always present in the moment.  Perhaps we are rarely so.  The photographer catches the moment and we who view the photograph see things we might not have seen otherwise.

Haven't you looked at photographs of family members and friends and seen for the first time certain features or resemblances that you had never noticed in your face-to-face contacts?  The photograph perhaps enables us to be somehow more "present" to the person - more aware.  We meet the person in the moment captured by the photograph.

The same is true, I think, of scenic photographs.  As we look at the details, the light and shadow, the forms and spaces, the lines and content, we become present and aware in the moment represented by the photograph.  We live in that moment, as we are invited to live in every moment.  The photograph opens us to something more, as is the potential of every moment without the photograph.

Perhaps the miracle of the moments captured by photography is their representation of something of God in that moment.  The present moment is where we meet God most directly.  It is not where God was or where God will be, but where God is.  Perhaps another part of the miracle is their challenge to us to allow every moment to speak and open, for there is something extraordinary in every moment.  Perhaps as we sharpen our lens in the moments of our days, we will catch more of the extraordinary.