Jaded Glory [Garden of the Gods]

Just before moving to Colorado Springs ten years ago, I asked a client if he had a view of Pikes Peak and the mountains from his home. He had lived here for several years and told me that he didn’t, and that after the first few years he had no longer paid much attention to the scenery. I told him I couldn’t understand how this could possibly be.

Recently while visiting a few locations around town, I’ve remembered how excited I felt early in our new life in the Springs: walking out of a home improvement store to the surprise of an incredibly beautiful sunset over the front range to the west of our home, on what was to be a delightful June evening, foretold by the cooling of the air; driving in total awe through various mountain ranges; hiking through the Garden of the Gods, fascinated by an area named so well; and more.

I realized that I, too, have become jaded to the glory of God’s creation all around me; even worse to God Himself, to some extent.

This morning, however, driving up Ute Pass to Green Mountain Falls, I was once again overtaken by the wonder and beauty of this area, praising God for the splendor of the deep green forests clinging to and climbing their way up the steep, rugged slopes of Pikes Peak, its fracture lines dusted with spring snow, standing as a senteinel against a brilliant blue sky.

What is it that causes one to become jaded to glory, whether creation or the Creator? Perhaps, I have been all consumed by our consumer society. I know I have become too busy, working way too many hours, driven by an anxiety to provide for our “needs.” I struggle to take control. I struggle to give up control. I have become jaded, but, today, have vowed to be so no longer.

200 Year Old Icon, Jesus, and Mary [Guatemala]

A rut worn dirt path of a hundred yards or so led to a very small house with a smaller out-building at the end of a cul-de-sac of sorts. My son and I were visiting the family with whom he had lived for six months while learning Spanish and working with an NGO in this small Guatemalan town affectionately called Chi Chi. Don Julio and Doña Marta, and their daughter were excited to see their “son” Andy again and to meet his dad, after having met his mom the summer before. It was a wonderful time, sitting in one of four tiny rooms, on a patio under a ceiling, yet surrounded by no walls, as twilight gently descended upon these gentle, humble people. Love was in the air. There was no doubting how real was their love for Andy and vice versa.

Before leaving, Don Julio and Doña Marta insisted we join them in their tiny kitchen for coffee and homemade pastries, Andy and I seated and we ate, as family stood and didn’t eat. This was a special treat reserved for very special occasions. Generously sharing their food was but a precursor to a more important sharing. Leading Andy and I a few steps over into their small bedroom, Don was very proud to show us his prized possession, a two hundred year old icon he worshipped daily, as had his father, grandfather, great grandfather, and great great grandfather. The icon was a small stone animal figure hung with old, rub-worn silver coins. This was a big moment for Don Julio, bringing a big smile to his face when I asked him if I could take a picture of his icon.

Doing so, I noticed how the icon had been carefully placed on a colorful woven mat sitting upon a dresser, prominently displayed in front of small pictures of Jesus and Mary, behind and to the icon’s left and right. The people of rural Guatemala, actually probably much of the population of this Catholicized country, had over time melded their centuries old animistic beliefs with that of the Roman prosletizers. Missiologists call this syncretism – the amalgamation of different religions, cultures or schools of thought.

I had photographed another example of this earlier that afternoon, a man performing an animistic ceremony, waving a can of incense back and forth outside the doorway of Chi Chi’s Catholic church on the town’s plaza. And then later that evening, I was in the right place at the right time to photograph an Ash Wednesday procession with Mayans carrying a richly decorated cross through the center of town, stopping each block to perform an animistic ceremony.

What an odd combination: a 200 year old icon, Jesus, and Mary. A situation, God Almighty cares for not in the least.

PJs and The Call [many questions, few answers]

It was Socrates who long ago observed that.“Contrast is the essence of inquiry.” How about the contrast of photographing kids in great need in a third world country one day and the next photographing cute kids, healthy fresh teens, and gracefully aging adults modeling pajamas, the most comfortable of all garments?

I am 54. I understand so little of what is so important. A Christian for 35 years yet an infant in the way of The Call.

What is The Call? Is it black & white; I either have it or I don’t? Is it a narrow path along which I walk, no steps to the left or right? What, if anything, has comfort, protection, or control have to do with The Call? Why if The Call is so self-absorbing do I allow other things so less significant to so absorb me?

Is there even such a thing as The Call? Have I really received it? Or am I perhaps just a foolish body stumbling forth carrying a weighty, arrogant presumption?

Even if God has called, can My Call make any difference? Or, does doing so even matter? Oh, the confusion of The Call to use documentary photography to help people look among the nations! observe! be astonished! and wonder! at all God is doing in the world (Hab. 1:5).

My life is bound ever so tightly by relentless fetters of time, 24 hours binding all of what I do, a finite beginning and end; fetters that bind my productivity. Or are these fetters but the stripes of yet another costume of self-deception barely clothing my drive for significance?

This contrast is too much, filling my mind with the deadly discomfort of days and days of “I just can’t answer these questions?” One day introducing people to the life and death, the eternal needs of needy people; the next luring the same folks into a complacent comfort lounging the day away clothed in cozy flannel and cool cotton. PJs and The Call?

The Look [Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala]

I suppose it is the fear of rejection and feelings of abandonment that have so plagued much of my adult life that draw me time and again to photos like this. Kids displaced, perhaps without parents, certainly with no home other than their tiny tent in a U.N. refugee camp. Bellies bloated, not from overeating, but undereating. Unkempt hair, dirty, dried mucous covered faces, and the look.

They look at nothing, their hollow eyes wide open pathways leading to empty, lonely places. They have so little. They know so little. Their lives are different than ours. Their’s are simpler.

They live in a small tent camp at the base of the mountains whose slopes yielded way to floods of mud that buried their home, destroyed their village, eternally covered many of their friends and family. They never had much. Now they have virtually nothing. They have memories, yet only those of the mudslide, all others buried along with everything else never to be seen again.

They were kids. Before the mudslides ended a few years had been added to their lives. They heard, saw, felt, smelled, touched, even tasted the muddy aging elixir. They are no longer young.

The look is one deprived of hope, subconsciously hardened by resignation. This is their lot, their feet held firmly in this place by the drying of the mud all around them. The look hasn’t changed much since the mud came down. The look won't change much for years to come, perhaps never.

My Son of So Much [Locke Mtn. Ranch]

Andy, I awoke this morning on the middle bunk, the cool, fresh air of the cabin confining me within the comfort of my sleeping bag, my head positioned such that I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the scene of gentle, morning sunlight falling on the path just outside the window over the stove, and thanful, my first thoughts of the day that I must be the luckiest person alive. What a blessing to awake so gently, without the rude intrusion of an alarm screaming out its frenetic call of obedience to a schedule that must be maintained, instead to be enveloped by absolute quiet, sheer simplicity, and incredible beauty.

I thought of you, how surely you, too, would savor such a moment. For you are my son of so much that I possess, able to keep the hounds of the analytical at bay, in order to let your sensitivities run ahead, following the dimly lit paths of your heart.

As is our habit, I heated up a cup of hot chocolate, sipping it as I walked up to the gate, Louie bounding up the hill ahead in her excitement to sniff out the happenings of the past evening and embrace the pleasures of the day before her, her only concern whether or not she will be fulfilled, having roused a rabbit to chase. You have been like her, pondering past days, yet excited by new ones to come, you, too, looking mostly for the chase that will bring you fulfillment. What another blessing: to have stood as your father, from your birth until present, only a few feet behind, close enough to experience the excitement of your pursuit of what is important to you.

Louie's, like almost all of life's chases, never go in a straight line from point A to point B. Instead, her chases are ruled by circularity, bounding here, then there, only to switch back, and then move ahead once again closer to her goal. For her goal, though it stays the same, never remains in the same spot, endlessly changing directions, knowing full well of its pursuer. Life's goals are like that, crushing the head's desire for linearity with frustrating, unplanned circuitous routes leading us here and there.

I'm wondering these days if the chase, one's unyielding pursuit, is not, in fact, the real goal that brings meaning. For, so much in life, once reached, is anti-climatic. Oh, that I could better understand and live out this thought. That I could let go and follow contentedly, even excitedly, the maze of paths I find myself so often following in frustration, pain, anger, and discontent. Goals, perhaps, are to be reached, yet only by following blindly, regardless of circumstances, the directions of our hearts, learning to trust fully in our selves informing our self.

My love for you is never ending,

Angel Behind Bars [Antiqua, Guatemala]

Staring through bars covering the window of a wealthy shop in an ancient city in an impoverished country is an angel. She sees not and moves not yet watches all the passersby this sunny afternoon: two cute school girls walking hand in hand, an elderly man and wife tourist team taking in the sights, a local drunk staggering, falling, sitting …each living lives with no recognition of this angel’s presence, nor that of the many other watchful unseens living just behind the bars of their perception.

Those Eyes [Guatemala City]

Her eyes say it all, yet what she says I can’t quite make out. I crouch before her, a wide angle lens framing a composition with her eyes and shoulders and her left arm all pointing in the same direction. She must be looking at another student.

Those eyes, rolled up and to her right, mostly white with just a piece of each pupil showing, they communicate. They dictate, giving orders to the mouth to form an almost imperceptible smirk. Those eyes must be looking at another student.

Each she answering a question from her teacher? Is she silently, gazedly responding to the whisper of a friend? Is she embarrassed by the nearness of my presence, unable to look at me, those eyes communicating “Why me? Let’s get this over with?”

Those eyes say it all. I’m just not quite sure what they are saying.