Windows into Mystery

The Christian Mystery, precisely as a mystery of redemption, demands that the believer learn to recognize that hidden within even the greatest of falls is the possibility to experience a transformative moment of grace.  This is true most importantly, and most impressively, on the plane of human moral and spiritual action and decision making.  It is also true on the much smaller, and humbler, stage of how one relates to the variety of failures and mistakes that make up so much of the experience of life.

All too often we run from our mistakes, reject them or simply seek to make a quick recovery and move on with whatever superficial learning a few instants of reflection might provide.  The failed work is quickly set aside.  And worse, all too often initial mistakes, initial failures discourage us and prevent us from moving forward along that particular path.  I have been thinking of this of late while I have been taking time to go through what has become a very large archive of photos.  While I am very pleased with a number of the shots in my collection, I am also conscious of how many of them are, bluntly put, failures – out of focus, improperly framed, over or under exposed – products of my own attempts to teach myself something of the serious photographer’s technique and trade, or simply the result of my own haste and lack of preparation and attentiveness.

The temptation to simply delete them is great.  Sometimes, however, the failed photograph merits a second, or even a third, look.  This is not simply because one wants to learn from his mistakes, but also because there just may well be something more than failure hidden in the details of the shot.  This picture is an example of this, a badly overexposed shot when I had tried to take a hand-held extended exposure of a small cascade in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.  I was just at the point of deleting the image which had been sitting in my archives for just over 2 years when I found my eye drawn to a bit of shadow between two bright fields of light and I found myself imaging what a careful cropping of the image might produce if the shot were converted to black and white in order to take advantage of the contrast.  The result is hardly great art, but I do find it a rather engaging image and one that I am much happier having found hidden within my failure than I would have been should I have simply deleted it and moved on.

Much like this nearly deleted digital file, there is so much of life that can be lost simply by designating aspects of ourselves, people around us or experiences as failures and then assuming that within failure there is no room for grace.  As a Christian and as a priest, failure in many ways is my business.  Indeed, rather than cast aside his fallen creation, the Almighty reaches into the failure and tragedy of human sinfulness to redeem us.  More wondrously still, however, our redemption is wrought through the folly, the glorious failure, of the Cross which wrests life away from the futility of the grave.  This is the Mystery which claims us in Christ and the power of this same Mystery is what heals us in the sacraments.  “O happy fault!  O necessary sin of Adam,” wrote St. Augustine in words the Church repeats each year on the holiest of nights, “which won for us so great a Redeemer!”  Darkness and light, are not simply elements that make for good photography and striking images.  The light of grace that reaches with a curiously intense and often unexpected power into the darkness of failure is very much a matter of Divine artistry.

We speak of light in many ways in the Christian tradition, but most of those ways, while very good, are metaphorical.  It is easy to overlook the beautiful and grace filled simplicity of light itself, a thing always around us and, as such, often simply taken for granted.  That is, of course, until it surprises us.  Earlier this month on Independence Day, light, rich with red warmth, silently filled the sky over Ozone Park.  So deep was its color that the appearance of the neighborhood itself was transformed beneath it.  Looking into the sky from the rectory window one could have easily believed himself to be suddenly caught up away from Queens and into the very realm of the Sacred.  And that is exactly what I felt after that first instant of stunned surprise when I had turned to look out the window of my office.  Sunfall came silently as it always does with nothing to herald its arrival and lingered in its full color for only a few minutes before its colors faded away as silently as they had come.  Not long afterward, darkness settled over the neighborhood and the noisy bravado of fireworks – light of a more ostentatious sort – drew the attention of everyone to their passing beauty.  For at least one priest, lucky enough to have his camera at hand, however, the real display of beauty in the sky last July 4 was silent and drew no attention to itself.

Enjoy the photos:

[Show as slideshow]

I always enjoyed saying that.

A good photographer has to go out and get the shot he wants and I’ve been wanting a certain shot for quite a while.  Situated high up on the front face of St. Mary Gate of Heaven Church in Ozone Park, NY where I am presently assigned, is a majestic statue of Jesus Christ holding his Cross, looking downward to the street and extending his hand in a gesture of blessing over those who pass along the front of the church and climb its steps to enter through the front doors.  Given the height of the statue, any shot from the ground was only going to produce a distorted and indistinct image and I had been making plans to see about gaining rooftop access to one of the buildings across the street in the hope that I would have a good angle to try for a more direct line of sight to shoot from with a telephoto lens.

However, with the recent work we have needed to do on the church building as we attempt to fix a number of leaks, it was necessary to bring a cherry picker onto the property and we were able to make an arrangement for the guys to take me up in the bucket this morning so that I could get a close up shot of the statue and of the statue of Our Lady situated below it just in front of the choir loft window.

The following photo should give a sense of just how high I had to go up to get the photo.  It was taken from the bucket of the cherry picker:

Here are a couple close-up looks of the statue of Jesus.  The Latin inscription on the Cross means “I am King.”  The detail on the statue is marvelous and it is a real treat to be able to see it as well as to make it available for others to see.

Enjoy the images and look for additional shots over in the Gallery soon.  I certainly enjoyed the experience of getting these photos.

The title says it all.  Click the image and enjoy.

This is a re-posting of words composed two years ago on the occasion of a previous redesign of this website.  There is much about these words that rings very true to me today at this point of new beginning – especially after having spent so much time preparing the photos for the new gallery.

This site has lain largely fallow for quite some time, and that was certainly not my original intent when I opened it for membership and posting last fall. Life, however, does not so easily correspond to our desires as one would like. These last months have brought me a number of powerful experiences both of the profound and tragic brokenness that marks the lives of so many as well as of the even more profound and compelling movement of grace. These are experiences to which, by and large, I could only respond with silence – silence of the heart and silence, as well, of the tongue and the pen.

Silence does not always imply stillness, however, and these last several months have been for me a time of much movement. Fully three months of the past year have been spent in Nicaragua, including three visits since last January. This itinerance has meant a certain necessary withdrawal from pursuits such as this site simply so that I could maintain my focus upon my commitments here at St. Mary Gate of Heaven as well as upon the work of preparing a revised process of preparation for those wishing to make Montfort’s Act of Total Consecration of Oneself to Jesus through Mary. That work has gone well and, much to my surprise, the draft work in Spanish has been written before that in my native language of English.

Through all of this I have felt a persistent tugging to return to this site and share something of the fruits of this time of – I am unsure how to express it – difficult beauty or beautiful difficulty. But I did not wish to do so until I felt sure of having both the energy and the focus necessary to maintain it as it merits. Even as the energy for posting here has returned, I found myself puzzled over the direction I wished to move with this site. Ironically, however, the answer has been quite literally in front of my eyes for some time without my possessing sufficient clarity of vision to realize it.

I have just returned from a trip home to Pennsylvania, and while there I had the opportunity spend some time with my camera in several churches in the small towns of the Coal Region. The treasures of art and spirituality, of a vision of Catholic belief and life, contained in these buildings has given me pause – especially in the realization of how much I myself am a product of these same powerful visual expressions of the Divine. There was a knocking in my heart as I stood with my camera before windows of stunning color and detail in silent places touched by the prayers of generations of families who, much like my own, found within the Catholic tradition a strength, a vigor, and an expressiveness which shaped not only their lives but the culture of the entire region.

Little exists, it seems, of a good photographic record of these places. That is not at all surprising, really, for such records are often scarce in places where the beautiful is a thing that meets the eye on a daily basis, and so can easily be taken for granted. The windows and the art of these buildings, have much to say, however, to that one whose sight allows him to perceive their speaking. And the stories they tell are at one and the same time aspects of that great story of God himself in the mystery of his saving love for us, as well as windows into the lives of those who worshiped in their company. These are stories that must be told, and there is an urgency of sorts with regard to the spiritual and artistic wealth of the churches of this region which are being consolidated and closed over the coming months. The loss of a few churches in rural Pennsylvania may seem at first glance to be a small thing, but the greatest of treasures are often found hidden under an aspect that is humble and unassuming. This holds true not only for the churches of the mountains of Pennsylvania’s Coal Region, but for all places where the beautiful stands each day by our side and we live without truly seeing it for we feel as if it will always remain with us.

The knocking that I have been feeling in my heart is peculiar in its narrow clarity. Windows into mystery for a Catholic are often exactly that – windows. These windows speak in their own way and they have much to tell us. And so, while this will not simply be a site dedicated to physical windows, however beautiful they may be, it is a site where everything that is posted will be done in an atmosphere colored by the spiritual theology of the stained glass windows that have colored and defined the spaces of Catholic life and worship through the centuries.