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But my favorite one, is when they are about to race and they call out “ready, steady, go!” — all my life, it’s been “ready, set, go!” But I’ve developed an appreciation for the “steady” part.

This week, I needed that steady. Two days off, one with snow and the other with ice and rain gave me a few more minutes to work on some things, but it still seemed like an unbelievably long week. I had wanted to write on silence — but ironically enough, there just wasn’t enough of it this week to allow me to think through what I wanted to say. I hope to move that theme to next week.

That’s what I call being steady; having the flexibility to keep standing and moving forward when circumstances don’t favor Plan A. So here are the pictures for the week:

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This year I choose St. Faustina’s diary. It’s a book that I have had for years and picked at here and there — an even attempted it during Lent several years ago. I guess I wasn’t ready for it yet.

This year every page seems to have a message for me — seemingly an example of “when the student is ready the teacher will appear.”

In my Dominican laity community, we have been working through Frank Sheed’s Theology and Sanity and this week reached the section on death, judgement and the end of the world. Great timing, huh?

St. Faustina says that God condemns no one — the soul freely chooses. What would lead a soul to choose eternal separation from the source of all its life and happiness? Our day to day life here on earth. Do we give all of our life to God? Do we keep part of it back for ourselves? Do we turn our back completely on God? As we go throughout our life, our will becomes set by the habits we keep. So much so, that at the end, faced with a final choice, some souls will choose eternal separation, literally Hell, as their final destination.

The moderator of our discussion was pointing out how “majestic” this freedom really is when you think about it. God loves and respects us so much that he doesn’t demand our love, even to the point of our tragic damnation.

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Well, it is so much easier to watch someone tell you how to develop the writing habit than it is to actually write, isn’t it? And, gosh, he might actually have something to say that could really help me… BUT, we all know how precious a commodity our time is and, I’m sorry but I don’t think Mr. Webinar could help me develop the habit any better than just sitting down at the computer and writing. The problem is that it has taken me to now to realize this and I’m still easy to fool and distract. No matter how many tips I read, it’s still work and it’s still going to feel like work so I best just get to it.

You know what else is an amazing place? The internet. This morning, to kickstart my writing, I was searching up quotes about time. I love looking up quotes online. I love the crazy attributions that get spread around. One quote was attributed to both Abraham Lincoln and John Lennon and I don’t think either one was correct.

We all feel oppressed by time. The demands of the day are bad enough but when you add in tomorrow’s worries and yesterday’s failures is it any wonder we feel pressed in? Baudelaire recommends us to “be drunken always” if we are to escape it’s oppression.

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”

Art, photography, prayer: they have the power of removing me from the time trap. Getting into that “flow,” that mysterious sense of being wrapped completely in an activity, a thought, a subject — that is a drunkenness that I crave. It’s the other demands on my time (laundry!) that don’t seem to be able to possibly create that creative flow that leave me annoyed, angry and resentful.

Coming back to reality after our week-long snowcation, I felt every inch of time’s oppression crushing me to the earth. It wasn’t long before exhaustion took over.

Sure, I can continue to experiment with the multiple exposure/ICM photography, but I better be happy with whatever I can shoot in 30 minutes because that’s all the time I get. Luckily this week we had some very interesting weather, with warm rain melting out two feet of snow and creating lovely fog everywhere, that made it a bit easier to pop over to Wolf Trap and grab a few (or 50 shots).

As always, it comes down to discipline. I tell my children constantly, “virtue is a habit of the will,” and who is in charge of the will?

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“Imagination is a uniquely human faculty that is connected with reality and faith at the same time. Human beings have the capacity to imagine the future and actually see it into reality. Further, for a Christian, imagination is even more valuable: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1) If you take this word of the New Testament seriously, it follows that you must have imagination in order to have faith.”

To be fair, I understand the point Fujimura is making — he is arguing against a kind of textural literalness that has historically plagued Christians: from the Iconoclasts to the reformation. In certain traditions, image has been relegated to second class status and that has done damage.

But I would argue that imagination is not only NOT essential for faith but can even be dangerously limiting of our spiritual growth. Does that seem outrageous? Frank Sheed in Theology and Sanity discusses the difference between our imagination and our intellect and argues that spiritual truths need to be understood by our intellect not our imagination.

Consider what imagination is. It is the power we have of making mental pictures of the material universe. What our senses have experienced —the sights the eye has seen, the sounds the ear has heard, what we have smelt, touched, tasted —can be reproduced by the imagination either as they originally came through our senses, or in any variety of new combinations…it is a subordinate part and entirely limited to the world of matter. What the senses cannot experience, the imagination cannot make pictures of….Thus the reality of any spiritual statement must be tested by the intellect, not by imagination.”

He continues by showing how, in our modern times, “unimaginable” has become nearly synonymous with “inconceivable” in common usage. Many things in our faith are beyond the reach of our senses but that doesn’t make them “inconceivable” it makes them “unimaginable” and difficult for our intellects to deal with. The imagination gives us the shamrock or triangle for the Trinity. But this simile doesn’t tell us anything about the Trinity. “The excuse for them [the smilies] is that they help us to see the doctrine. But they do not. They only help us to swallow the doctrine. They prevent the doctrine from being a difficulty…For the Faith binds us to accept many truths altogether beyond imagination’s reach, and will not allow imagination to reject them.”

The Catholic sacraments are a good and true antidote to that literalism that Fujimura is arguing against. They are signs that effect what they say. They are concrete and sense-based, because as embodied souls we know and learn trough our senses. But at the same time they point to a literal truth that is beyond our senses. They are not inconceivable, they are only unimaginable. They are Mysteries. And here I’ll turn to Abbot Vonier (and St. Thomas Aquinas) for help:

It would be a great disparagement of the sacraments to look upon them as mere veils of more substantial spiritual realities. They are not veiling anything; they are complete realities in themselves, existing in their own right. They are not infirma et infirma elementa, weak and mean shadows of things; they are the virtue of God and the power of God.

Our minds are finite, we are made of matter, and we can never truly hold something infinite in our finite minds. But, “My grace is sufficient” and that is why we have Mysteries in our faith. Sheed concludes, “…a Mystery is not something that we can know nothing about: it is only something that the mind cannot wholly know. A Mystery, in short, is an invitation to the mind. For it means that there is an inexhaustible well of Truth from which the mind may drink and drink again in the certainty that the well will never run dry, that there will always be water for the mind’s thirst.”

And that is so much greater than imagination.

But please don’t mistake my point for meaning imagination is worthless. It certainly isn’t for living a fully human and beautiful life. It just isn’t essential for faith. Faith, as pure gift, is a dark thing — a black box that we cannot see inside to how it functions. Like Sheed points out, infinity just can’t fit into something finite. That is just a fact as plain as the nose on your face. It’s something we have to accept. There’s only been one time when that was changed. John Donne’s beautiful poem, Annunciation, ends with the line, “Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.” But the Incarnation is another post…

Since we had the week off because of the big snow storm, I was able to spend a lot of time playing with my camera and working on my impressionistic styles. It’s such a thrill to be able to create these images. I am grateful for each one that I feel is successful and I try not to be too frustrated by the ones that don’t seem to work.

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“There are, indeed, large areas of reality in danger of being thus forgotten. And, of course, it is not up to the fine arts alone to counteract this danger that threatens the entire breadth and depth of human existence. Here we somehow sense the artist’s inner relationship to the priest, who is called, above all, to keep alive the remembrance of a face that our intuition just barely perceives behind all immediate and tangible reality — the face of the God-man, bearing the marks of a shameful execution. Incidentally, none other than Goethe declared that the artists should be seen “as someone called to be the custodian and eager herald of an avowed sacred reality.” ―Josef Pieper Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation pg.62

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” ― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Very often we feel restricted in our situation, our family, or our surroundings. But maybe the real problem lies elsewhere: in our hearts. There we are restricted, and that is the root of our lack of freedom. If we loved more, love would give our lives infinite dimensions, and we would no longer feel so hemmed in.” ―Fr. Jacques Philippe Interior Freedom p.20

“Defend me, O God, and plead my cause against a godless nation. From deceitful and cunning men rescue me, O God.” ―Psalm 43

“His gaze was like lightening, and I understood how the fire of God’s love burns in that look…” ―St. Faustina Diary pg. 459

“Sin itself first enters the world through the eye.” ―Fr. Anthony Giambrone, OP The Incarnation and Art

“Art surges forth from some elemental responsiveness to what is supremely delightful and our aspiration to sustain an ecstatic gaze upon that beauty, a beauty sady. where here below continually eludes our perfect grasp. Art seeks to capture intuitions of the eternal as thought in its own way seeks the same.” ―Fr. Anthony Giambrone, OP The Incarnation and Art

“Reason itself became the vessel of God’s image in Israel. Now all that moves art toward reason and abstraction has the effect of entoning the transcendent in the eternal and this is crucial…Nevertheless, a balance is required, outrageous geometrical painters like Piet Mondrian have lost all account of art’s significance as an act of human artists actively striving in nostalgic disappointment. Like Islamic art, his work represents an accomplished perfection not a dissatisfied yearning.” ―Fr. Anthony Giambrone, OP The Incarnation and Art

“For even the most intensive seeing and beholding may not yet be true contemplation. Rather, the ancient expression of the mystics applies here: ubi amor, ibi oculus ― the eyes see better when guided by love; a new dimension of “seeing” is opened up by love alone! This means contemplation is visual perception promted by loving acceptance.” ― Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation, pg. 74

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Now I struggle to get any words out — I squeeze and squeeze and only a few dribble out: stilted, insipid, characterless.

I could blame the kids. Seven children is just crazy in this day and age. Friends, family, acquaintances, strangers; they all feel perfectly at ease informing me of my madness. It isn’t easy.

But I can’t blame our counter-cultural life for my difficulty. The fault really lies in my mind.

My thoughts are incoherent fragments: shattered safety glass. Hundreds of tiny dull fragments glisten on the pavement — unable to make a point.

Just like this week’s collection of photos.

Real life has this way of interrupting art-making plans. And then there is the perennial fear — why do this? What on earth difference could it make to me or anyone?

The point is to just be. And to create. Not for anyone in particular — just because I enjoy doing it. I exist in a fog of demands from others and I don’t mind serving them — they are my joy.

But in the end there does have to be some small space for me to create something beautiful as a way of thanking God for all I have.

Maybe I am guilty of making it too mystical but, in truth, I think I’m guilty of making it too mundane. As I’m searching for that image or that word I need to remember in humility who uttered it first.

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Spare simplicity is my hope. One day, when all the children have grown up and moved away, when my husband and I are alone, I will be able to clear out the piles of accumulated stuff from the corners of my home: clothes, books, broken toys, papers, plastic sippy cups, half-completed projects abandoned, nerf darts.

Last time I finished a 365 photo project, I swore it would be the last. Instead of spending so much energy searching for the day’s photo, I would take that time to develop a more complex body of work. I began the studies in abstracts, multiple exposure and blur. Removing the discipline of the daily photo exercise, however, didn’t lead to more time for complex projects, it led to no projects. Without the urgency of a daily goal to be checked off, things tended to slide to “tomorrow.” Tomorrow had it’s own set of problems that took all of tomorrow’s time. Photographing anything quickly degraded to photographing nothing.

So here I am, doing another 365. This time I’m pairing it with writing however to try and improve my skills. 365 photos (or actually since it’s a leap year, 366) and an essay every week — 52 themes.

That’s just such an American thing to do, though, isn’t it? The articles start trickling in around the beginning of December — “5 Things Every Super-Productive and Crazy-Creative Does While You are Still Sleeping You Pathetic Slob!” Outrageous click-bait titles scream at you from every social media outlet, TV and grocery check-out lane. By New Year’s Day the roar is absolutely deafening.

Escaping from “efficiency” and “productivity” and “one word for the year” sent me back to “what’s your creative project for the year?” Thoughts like that always make me a little sad. I don’t own my time — there are many demands on it from people who have a legitimate right to demand it: children, spouse, students. So the goal is really to use what I have not with an eye to cold efficiency or maximum productivity but with joy and love. Without love, it’s all noise.

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Whether I can see that now or not, is another story — or another post. Watch this space!

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