Church should challenge us to blur lines, dissolve boundaries and discover Jesus in the worldly.
cannot deny that God’ s grace can be made visible in even the most unlikely of places.
To embrace a faith rooted in flesh and reflected in the“ secular” is not to discount the value of church. Quite the opposite. An expansive faith is difficult, if not impossible, to bear alone. An expansive faith must rest on the shoulders of community. A church community should remind us that we are but one part of the larger body of Christ, which is not limited to our space or our people or our beliefs. A church community should demand we turn outward when we want nothing more than to turn only to them. A church community should teach us what turning outward looks like. A church community should push us out into the world and then accept us back like any good mother with open arms, soothing words and Band-Aid’ s if necessary, never letting us rest too long before pushing us out again.
Influential documentary photographer and photojournalist Dorothea Lange suggested that“ the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” It strikes me that church should do the same-- teach people how to see without church. Each of us is called and equipped to participate deeply in God’ s continuing act of creation
and reconciliation. What is church for if it does not encourage us to recognize this truth, cultivate our distinct abilities, and turn outward so that we might see and point to Christ at work in the world? So that we might be God’ s work in the world? Church should challenge us to blur lines, dissolve boundaries and discover Jesus in the worldly. Church should facilitate a participative and sacramental faith.
We were but dust turned bones before God breathed into us the breath of life. Photography is one way I attempt to turn that breath breathed into me at the beginning outward. It is how I remind people, and myself, that deep within us is a God-space that cannot be made unclean, that there is a grace that moves between us that cannot be denied, that there is within us still that first breath of God. It is one part of the participative and sacramental faith I feel called to live.
CRYSTAL HARDIN
Crystal Hardin is a postulant in the Diocese of Virginia, sent by St. George’ s, Arlington, where she served as senior warden. She holds a JD from the University of Alabama and practiced law before becoming a freelance photographer. She begins at Virginia Theological Seminary this fall.
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