“You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” With these words, an angel of the Lord brought good news of great joy to all people. The divine Word, present as the Holy Trinity created the vast cosmos could never be contained by all creation. That Word made flesh would be found wrapped in bands of cloth. God became incarnate, emptying God’s own self to be born in Bethlehem. The object that gave the shepherds the key clue to finding the right newborn was “manger.” They were to discover the King of Creation by looking amongst the livestock for an infant whose parents pressed a food trough into service as a cradle.
The manger served as the fulcrum for the lever that would turn the world right-side up once more. Jesus’ mother Mary, the God bearer, made this abundantly clear in her prophetic hymn of praise, the Magnificat. Mary exults at a reversal of fortunes as God is faithful to promises made in ages past by bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly. The rich are sent away empty, while the hungry are filled with good things. As Jesus would later say, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” “The one who would be the greatest must be the servant of all.”
Mary had none of the outward appearance that those in first-century Palestine would associate with God’s blessing. She was neither rich nor had any earthly power. Yet, she sang of God’s promises being fulfilled with verbs all in the past tense. She could see clearly that, as God had noticed her and called her blessed among women, then the world was as good as turned upside down, which was to set it back as it was meant to be.
This brings to mind for me a Jewish expression captured in a hymn sung during a Passover seder, the Deyenu. The compound Hebrew word “deyenu” means “it would have been enough.” The song recounts all that God did to deliver the Hebrew people out of bondage to Pharaoh. So that one proclaims, “If God had taken us out of Egypt and not made judgments on them; it would have been enough” and continues through step by step until, “If God had brought us into the land of Israel and had not built us the Temple; it would have been enough.”
I return to this hymn in my mind again and again when something marvellous happens and I think that if this alone is all God did for me, it would have been enough. In the form of the Deyenu, “If God had allowed me to baptize this teenager and no one else, it would have been enough.” Or perhaps, “If God had let me be with this family as we prayed last rites together and nothing else, it would have been enough.”
Christmas recalls the greatest of these “it would have been enough” moments: “If God had become human in a baby found wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger; it would have been enough.” God becoming human in Jesus changed everything. The God Bearer Mary was so very right in singing that with the birth of Jesus, the world is good as turned aright once more.
I can recall so well the magical feeling of a Christmas morning walk in an overgrown field behind our house when I was back home on break from college. This was wild land as an array of weeds and small trees competed with one another as they took root on the empty lot.
I had outgrown the yearning for presents that characterized Christmases of my childhood. I was enjoying the seven of us together. I don’t remember what gifts I received. I do remember feeling good about the morning of unwrapping gifts in a calmer way than my four siblings and I could have managed when we were younger. The morning felt just right, with nothing else needed. Then, my dad brought out one last, not-particularly large, gift-wrapped box. He seemed so pleased. I had no idea what it could be. Inside, I found the unexpected gift of a Nikon camera. Until then, my forays into photography had been with my dad’s old Yashica. This was a Nikon of my own.
It was still early enough that when I went out after breakfast, the fog that enshrouded that morning had yet to break. I took my gift for a walk to see what I could see. The dew-covered weeds overtaking the lot seemed magical to me. Quiet stillness is what I remember. No noise except the occasional bird sounds. The photos I took that morning would never make it to a nature calendar, but they were the beginnings of me gaining a better sense of capturing my perspective on the world through a lens. Photography encourages me to pay close attention to what I am seeing and then attend to how I frame what interests me so that I can share my perspective with others.
Over the next few years, I started working for Georgia Southern’s student newspaper, then the yearbook, the Public Relations Department and the Statesboro Herald. I would graduate and take a job as a newspaper photographer first in Warner Robins and later in Rome, Georgia. I honed my craft in newspaper work so that shutter speed and aperture and the rules of composition became second nature. I still enjoy that part of photography, the technical side. Then, when I had an assignment to get a photograph of a given subject, like the office manager whose passion was playing for the local symphony, I could use that craft to get a technically good picture for the paper. But the art of photography, which continues to draw me in, comes in discovering the world in surprising ways through attentiveness. This way of seeing the world is as much about feeling as seeing. How does this feel and how do I convey that feeling?
I now understand how the two ways I practice photography–the first with a set plan of what I need to document or show, the second going out and discovering what captivates me–are an apt metaphor for two ways of being with God–in saying our prayers and being prayerful.
This summer while on sabbatical, I read Brother David Steindl Rast’s book Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness In it, Brother David writes, “It is not prayers that count, but prayerfulness.” In unpacking this for myself, I could see anew something I had already experienced, that we need both of these: the prayers of the church and a prayerful attentiveness to life.
In finding my way into the Episcopal Church, I was drawn by Word and Sacrament in the liturgy where scripture is taken seriously as the Word of God, as are the outward signs of the inward and spiritual grace we find in the sacraments. I found myself pulled into the Anglican way of connecting myself more fully to Christ through threefold practices found in the Book of Common Prayer of weekly Communion, Daily Office, and private devotions. Decades ago, I added daily prayer using the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer to my gathering weekly with others for the Holy Eucharist, and then I added other private devotions, including other forms of prayer, as well as confession. The discipline in this simple way of living offers a life of prayer that shapes one over time. As the water of a creek flowing over stones smooths off the rock’s rough edges, so this ongoing pattern of prayer shapes my soul. But these prayers, as vitally important as they are, do not encapsulate all of my worship of God, the Holy Trinity. These disciplines nourish me even as they open up a prayerful way of living that encompasses my whole life.
Brother David put it this way in his book Gratefulness, “It happens that people who are in the habit of saying prayers at certain set times have their moments of genuine prayer precisely at times when they are not saying prayers. In fact, they may not even recognize their most prayerful moments as prayer. Others who never say formal prayers are nourished by moments of deep prayerfulness. Yet, they would be surprised to learn that they are praying at all.”
Here, he is getting at something people who identify as spiritual, but not religious, get precisely right: we can experience God as fully in nature as we do in the worship of the church. We get a powerful sense of connection to the divine in the beauty of a sunrise, a star-filled night sky, a waterfall, or through the little world glimpsed inside drops of dew hanging from weeds that died back for winter in a field on a Christmas morning. These moments of wonder point to a deeper reality that binds the world together in ways we could otherwise miss. Those of us who do identify as religious discover that the God we glimpse in creation is known more fully in the specific revelation of scripture, and most fully in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
A prayerful way of engaging with creation will reveal that there is infinitely more to life than we might first be able to perceive. This is where the life of prayer comes in. That simple way of being that is at the heart of Anglican spirituality is shaped by weekly Eucharists, where we encounter God in Word and Sacrament in the midst of a given group of people; the daily offices where structured prayers and scripture reading together with intercessions for ourselves and others further hones our spiritual imaginations; and also through other devotions including confession through which we acknowledge the ways we have fallen short. All of these are Means of Grace that the Holy Spirit uses to enlighten the eyes of our hearts. Then we begin to see God in more and more places until we realize that the God who transcends all creation is also working in and through all this fallen world, including you and me.
Our prayers feed our prayerfulness; they give us the eyes to see and know God through scripture, through time of structured prayer, through the sacraments, and all of these point us to God the Holy Trinity, who is beyond all and in all. This allows us not just to see and know the creator of the cosmos in a stunning sunrise, which can be soul-stirring, but to also know the presence of the living God in the emergency room and in Hospice Care, and in the difficult days we face in our lives.
That Christmas morning with my new Nikon lit a spark of wonder in my soul. Photography continues to encourage me to really see what I am seeing and to pay attention to the world around me. The life of prayer does this work by giving us eyes to see God in ways we would otherwise miss.
As we journey toward Christmas, through this season of Advent, which is a time for preparing not just for a babe being born in Bethlehem, but also for Jesus’ return in glory, may the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make the light of his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
