Clergy Wellness Corner: “Focus” on the Holy

Rev. David Tinney | Senior Pastor, Vancouver First UMC

I really think photography ought to be added to the list of spiritual disciplines. As we search for the picture, we flirt with the light, we humbly kneel and bend looking for the right angles, we wait patiently for the breezes to finish blowing or the foreground to clear of unnecessary distractions, and we get lost in the beauty of God’s magnificent creation.

I take great delight in mounting one of my ancient 40-plus-year-old lenses on one of my newest digital camera bodies and celebrating how they work together. As I near retirement, it feels like acting out a metaphor on aging gracefully and meaningfully.

There is a beauty in knowing light, temperatures, speeds, apertures, and ASA/ISOs well enough that you can ignore all the fancy buttons and programs on the latest cameras and go “old school.” I know camera companies really don’t want to hear this but there is so much freedom, creativity, and engagement with the picture when you turn off all the fancy features and go manual. For me it is like turning off the noise of life and all of those instant solutions and discovering life on your own again.

Ministry is complicated, confusing, messy, and full of distractions.  Photography has been one of my relief valves.

Ministry is complicated, confusing, messy, and full of distractions.  Photography has been one of my relief valves. When I throw a camera over my shoulder and go for a walk all hurry vanishes and I can actually feel my soul start to heal. Hurry is an enemy to the soul, and learning to wait for the light to be right or the eagle to return to its nest tends to weaken hurry’s hold.

Life leading up to this past Easter was extremely hurried, distracted, and overwhelming. My wife Carol suggested that it would be a good time to take a vacation and get lost somewhere in the northwest where no one could find us. We rented a cabin and took our three-year-old Golden up into the wilderness area south of Mount Rainier. I took my cameras and I don’t think we even got properly unpacked before I was out shooting.

It became a photo-cation as we wandered in creeks, up the sides of mountains, and got lost more times that we were found. There were no expectations, no schedules to keep, and no planned routes that we were supposed to take. In fact, as we were heading north to see the Kitsap Peninsula, we kept passing along the western side of Mount Rainer and it would poke its white summit out and surprise us. On normal days I would have stopped along the road to shoot the picture, but this was not a normal day. The foreground was always filled with brush and clear-cut hillsides and I wanted something better.

Years ago when I was a photojournalist, I used to feel pictures coming. It is hard to explain but I learned to trust my instincts and feel where the picture was going to be and where I had to be in order to get it. So on this particular day, I turned to Carol, who was driving, and said, “I feel that if we take the next road to the right we are going to get an amazing picture of the mountain and I believe there is even going to be a beautiful lake in the foreground.” She laughed like she did back in the newspaper days. So we took the next road. After a few miles it looked like we needed to think about turning around but suddenly we turned the corner and there was the mountain and this amazing lake in the foreground. The picture above shows the beauty we discovered by slowing down, listening to the mystery around us, and trusting our instincts.

One of the favorite things I like to do with photography is to put a frame around ordinary things that most people pass right by and turn it into something beautiful. I go out in the backyard and find leaves that have been decaying all winter and photograph their skeletons with hard sidelights, or shoot a pile of old bricks stacked in a yard and turn up the saturation in the color and suddenly they are a masterpiece. In many ways it reminds me of our work as pastors as we redeem the brokenness in the world. The camera offers a graceful way to see the world and the beauty of Creation.

Please don’t think that you have to have expensive cameras and antique lenses to enjoy photography enough to make it a spiritual discipline. Nearly every smart phone today has greater capabilities than many of the cameras of the past. As a challenge for Lent two years ago, I decided to shoot a picture every day with my iPhone, and by the end of the challenge I was surprised by the quality of the pictures, but also the joy that I had from sharing my pictures and slowing my pace.

Ministry is hard enough as it is.  Grab your camera and focus on something else for a while and feed your soul.