Yet the graced eye can glimpse beauty everywhere, seeing the divine at work in the hidden depths of things. It is so easy to let our senses be dulled and to settle for the ordinary. Often, life seems to be just what it offers on the surface; as Ecclesiastes puts it, “there is nothing new under the sun” (1:9). The technology, speed, and busyness so prized by our Western culture foster a habit of blindness. For all the bustle, a dreary sameness comes to mark the places where we live. We forget that there is a vast depth beneath the apparent surfaces of things.
Image above (and on front-page mastheads): 5-2 Early Evening Puddle by Scott Fisher.
Words above by Christine Valters Paintner, PhD in Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice (published by Ave Maria Press, 2013).