This piece first ran in the St. Tim’s Episcopal Church newsletter on September 15, 2020.
Yesterday I met with my spiritual director, a Jesuit priest whose gracious listening and thoughtful questions have made him a lifeline for me during this season. I had just laid out what I thought was an awfully strong case for despair at the state of the world, when he stood up from his office chair and invited me to take a seat in front of his computer. "I want to show you something," he said with a gentle smile. My spiritual director, who is himself a photographer, showed me a talk given by Dewitt Jones, a former National Geographic photographer.
If you are able, I invite you to go watch the talk now. Don't worry, I'll still be here when you get back!
...cue hold music...
Hi there.... welcome back!
OK, so here's what got me about Dewitt's talk. The photographer testifies through compelling stories and stunning imagery to the power of changing our perspective. His guiding mantra as an artist and in life is:
"Celebrate what's right with the world."
Celebrate?! One could easily retort that celebration is a terribly tall order in these challenging times. I mean, c'mon, we're facing COVID and racial injustice and political upheaval and... and... and...
But Dewitt invites us to pause. Time to take a breath and stick around long enough to notice what is good. He asserts that just the tiniest shift in perspective can change the way we engage with the world. When we adopt the lens of wonder -- which children certainly remind us to use, as one child earthsshakingly did for Dewitt -- things fall into their right order.
Beauty pulsates at the center of the universe. Mystery beckons us to leave our right/wrong, good/bad dichotomies behind. Love binds it all together.
Jesus lived and taught this wisdom too. Jesus, who had every reason to despair as a member of a violently persecuted religious minority living under the thumb of the colonizing Roman Empire, claimed what was right in the world by paying attention to... birds.
"Look at the birds of the air," Jesus says to his anxious followers in Matthew 6:26, "They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?"
In the midst of injustice and suffering, Jesus looks up to the sky, sees a flock of birds, and goes, "Right. Time to celebrate that God provides."
What can you pay attention to today that will remind you of what is eternal? What can you celebrate that will help you trust that God continues to permeate everything -- even that which is most painful, anxious, and difficult? Indeed, those are the very places where God is most present with us.
Despair is easy. Joy asks us to linger just a moment longer. Joy asks, as my spiritual director so frustratingly and wonderfully delights in asking me, "Can you find God in the mess?" And while we may come up short (I generally do), Jesus is there, looking with us.
See him now? He calls you by name, and then points his finger in the direction of something beautiful. With the eagerness of a child discovering the world for the first time, he exclaims, "LOOK!"