Faith in the family

I am trying to get out more to walk and to pay attention to my surroundings when I do. There is something about having a camera or a decent phone with me, I find it makes me more observant. I am looking around, seeking out beauty, noticing little things that otherwise might escape my attention. Sometimes it is the big view, the beauty of hills, an expanse of sky, rolling waves – we do live in Donegal after all. Many times though it is the small beauties, moss on a tree trunk, heavy frost on the hedgerow, water running over stones, a bird on a branch.

I can spend a lot of time lost in my own head, thinking about things, sorting the problems of the world, making to-do lists. In that mode I could walk a couple of kilometres and not pay attention to anything. Taking photographs grounds me and demands that I be present and aware of what is around me. So in its own way it is a meditation on beauty. It enables me to enter into and be a part of the creation that surrounds me. And in its own way, it echoes a little of the effect the Camino had on me.

My niece and god-daughter Hannah is eight – nearly nine – and asked for a camera for Christmas. That camera has opened up a world of wonder for her. One of her first pictures, using the X45 zoom on the camera, was a fabulous picture of the moon. The clarity and detail of the picture are amazing. Hannah isn’t overly keen on long walks but, camera in hand, she is prepared to head out with her family exploring the world and discovering new opportunities for her photography.

In a world where children spend so much time in front of screens it is wonderful to engage them in the natural world and photography is such an easy way to do that. Most mobile phones now have a decent enough camera and are easy for any of us – child or adult – to capture a picture. This also offers an opportunity to talk about creation, to talk about how intricate, beautiful and interconnected things are. Wonder and awe is one of the gifts of the Spirit and here is a way to nurture it.

And talking of pictures, I was at an exhibition in the County Museum yesterday, called “Naming the Children”. Local artists have painted portraits of children who lives were lost in situations of war or terrorism across the world. It stops you in your tracks, to look at the laughing face of a young boy and then read that he and many members of his family died when their home was bombed in Palestine.

It is all too easy to go through life knowing that awful things happen, that war and terror destroy lives, that children here in Ireland are homeless, that children and families regularly drown in the Mediterranean trying to reach a place of refuge. We know these things at an abstract level but it is only when we look at the face of a child and read their story or imagine that the child is yours or mine that it becomes real. To allow ourselves to be present, to notice, to see the reality is again, a meditation, not on beauty but on suffering. As Christians we are called to such meditations, to give space to both beauty and suffering in our lives – and called to respond.