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This is my favorite photograph. I took this picture on my digital camera. I bought this camera a few years ago. I thought it would be a pretty good idea, you know, an attempt to document my life. Maybe even weave myself into the narrative a little better. This is a photograph I have been spending considerable time staring upon. I printed it out. I hold it and I look at it. It is a beach and the water sits flat like a plate over long shallow shoals that slowly stretch out toward the barrier islands and the Gulf beyond. There is evidence at its lower corner of tire treads. That doesn’t seem right. There is a large hole in the sand, possibly from erosion (surrounded by small piles of detritus…flotsam) and stretching out across the waterscape are the skeletal tinker toy pylons of a civic pier one quarter of a mile long. I have been in Mississippi for a couple of weeks. It is a disaster there. *********************** I have a friend who recently wrote to me. She left the coast and returned to her church in Georgia where she is a priest. She talked about “continuing to get tears in her eyes.” I've shared my pictures with folks, but I know it can't begin to convey what it is really like. I know that on all sides of my 4 x 6 photos, the destruction just goes on in all directions. What this made me think of was Modern Art and how in a certain way modernism obliterated the idea of The Frame. It assumed in its abstraction that the image painted, in fact, extends beyond the canvas outward. Which, of course, it does. Odd isn’t it? That modernism furthered an abstraction and came up with a rendering that is more like life while revolting against the artifice of the old, the formal and mannered which everyone thought was real: like life. Please don’t hold me to my aesthetics, but what a great thought… I kind of missed her point, didn’t I? My friend in Georgia shared something very genuine with me. She was talking about weeping, unable to convey what could not be seen, heartbroken holding her inadequately composed photos. I responded with something esoteric and ironic. I have a bad habit of protecting a certain part of my heart with glibness, or humor. My mind and, yes, my feelings twirl and summersault when I am unable to express myself or comprehend or I feel threatened. ******** Please look at the image again. This is what you cannot see. Directly behind you are US Highway 90, Scenic Drive and a portion of a residential, coastal town called Pass Christian, Mississippi. Every home within eyesight and for nearly a mile inland is either a concrete slab on the ground, a flooded pile of rubble, mold and refuse or, no longer sitting on its property at all. If you could see beyond this photo, following the image to the west (the right), absolute destruction will nearly obliterate six coastal towns and communities for more than twenty miles and at some points three or more miles inland. If you turn to the east (the left), it may be even worse. For the next six miles nothing within a mile of the coastal highway remains. As you try and imagine what that might look like, please remember; I said, “Nothing.” Hell, even Wal-Mart didn’t survive! Beyond Long Beach the names of the cities and towns rattle off like the roll of the dead: Gulfport, D’Iberville, Biloxi, Ocean Springs, Gautier and Pascagoula. Over 50,000 homes have been lost to the east. ********** To Convey – I am unable to convey what I have seen. My images that I can show you, 4 x 6 or neatly rendered in PowerPoint, are inadequate. They are framed, seized and limited. The image does not show me the whole of it. I am often overcome by similar feelings of frustration or impotence when I stare down on the cold, framed images of my life. They don’t look good my shortcomings, my brokenness, wrath, rage and unhealed neglect. These images? I can’t see beyond their own, self-obsessive limits and frames: iPhoto anyone? ************** He told me he likes the idea of when the artist is looking at the image, it is held in the creator’s hands. Those hands and even the arms are a part of the view. I believe that God is looking upon the image of your life. We are not framed in the mind of our God. God sees you and me extending outward. Our presence, our gifted essence, our future, goes forth in all directions beyond the painted canvas of our limited perception that we only behold slimly. You are not bound by space. I am not bound by time. ***************** There are a couple simple lines in the second chapter of Luke. Luke 2:1-7 1) And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled…. And all went to be enrolled, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; to be enrolled with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. I am wondering what it was like for Mary. Her life, what she could see of it, was a mess. She was betrothed to some older man she barely knew and who, thankfully, was pretty decent. She was away from her home and family. She had received some comfort from a kinswoman but that was a while ago. She had a sense that what was happening in her life was in God’s control, but it was probably hard to find anyone who understood what she was feeling. She was about 15 years old and she was pregnant: really pregnant as a matter of fact! It would be understandable if she were a little “unable” to see what was going on in her life. It is generally believed through the history of the church that Mary is considered blessed because she had faith that her Lord could see. That she believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord. Luke 1: 45. This is the experience that would be good to think on this Advent. There may be nothing in the picture of our lives that looks right. May we learn to see with the eyes the Creator sees with. God looks down on our image and first of all they see themselves: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A part of God’s vision encompasses the Hands that touch you and the arms that uphold and sustain you. You are looked upon and seen going outward and beyond the limits of the frame and canvas of your reality and of this world. It is that wholeness and fullness that Christ came to save and reconcile to the Father. It is the Christmas story, entering our history, making God flesh: a baby in a manger. In the glimmer of that truth I begin to understand how these stories are meant to end a different way, different from what I can see. How mouths choked with sand and dust will one day be filled with laughter, how cries are covered by shouts of joy and a mother’s embrace of a newborn child eclipses the travail of birth and the pain of all of life’s loses. Bearing seeds in sorrow is only a season, a cold and dark one in the still late winter days that have hardly begun to lengthen. If you’ve known this crunch of frozen earth under your feet, the dampened cold in a dawn without light, you know that this is hardly a hopeful image. God sees more than us, outward and beyond the limits of our understanding and promises a harvest of joy and fullness. Back to this image, the last thing you cannot see. I had taken this photo and walked up the sand to where a portion of the road is being rebuilt. I sat down on some old concrete steps that used to lead down to the beach before they were covered by a boardwalk that is now destroyed along with most of the old concrete steps. That was where I cried and I asked God to help me see how this place, these people, would ever get out of this mess. Amen. —Bruce Colville
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