I saw a Huff Post Religion story that featured a cropped version of this Ansel Adams photo of McDonald Lake in Glacier National Park. This one really does a good job evoking the sense of the sacred: silent, deep, and mysterious—fleeting and always eluding being named. It seems to invite us to plunge into the blackness of its eternal depth. More than the objectivity of the natural scene, the photo reveals Adams’ subjectivity.
I actually noticed this photo posted on social media and the person who had shared it commented that "Even in black and white these photos bring nature alive..." I think in many ways black and white does a better job of communicating the spiritual because in its use we glimpse more into the soul of the artist than at the natural scene itself. A work of art is inherently spiritual because it is inherently human. It communicates something to us about the artist and about his or her relation to that which is the object of artistic intention. We can experience the same thing in a work of art regardless of whether it is expressed in words, paint, photographs... the possibilities are practically endless.
The sacredness of human expression leads us to search for that which lies in the depths of mystery. However, we fail utterly if we merely objectify the divine. God waits for us in our everyday subjective experiences. It is up to us to discover the sacred and the beautiful in the depth of those experiences and to transform what we find lacking in beauty into that which becomes resplendent with divine presence. It's all about creating a holy moment. I recently saw on a social page for a clergy that his business is "creating holy moments." This is something that all of us can practice and put into our daily living.
Christianity as a religion lends itself especially to discovering the sacred and divine in human experience because we understand the divine to be inseparable from humanity in the human person Jesus. We learn in Christianity to discover God in human experience; to find God in each other just as we are. When we go to work tomorrow morning will we see our day as drudgery or is there a chance that we will reach out to others and allow our lives to express the art of the divine in the ordinariness of our experiences and encounters?
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