Thursday, July 9, 2026 In the Grace of the Beauty

I am reading a book called Reclaiming Quiet by Sarah Clarkson. The subtitle is “Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention.“ She’s a good writer and I have felt quite bathed in the beauty of her observations about what it means to seek and find God in the quiet moments. Our busy lives don’t always lend themselves to moments of silence, the way we usually think of what it means to have quiet. We have to redefine what quiet means, and make a way to find it all through our busy days.

I just read a section in which she was talking about the way we tend to mediate all our experiences through our phone cameras. She said “When I mediate the whole of my experience through my camera, whipping it out at every hint of intense or immersive experience, I’m ending the very thing I set out to record. I am jolted back to a place where I’m standing apart from the thing I want to capture. I’m no longer in the grace of the beauty I have recorded.“

I know exactly what she means. I have been enamored with cameras and photography for a long time, but there have been times when I realized I could either watch and enjoy the thing that was happening or I could take photos of it. I could not do both. This is why we hire wedding photographers so we can enjoy the wedding without having to look through a lens. And yet, how wonderful it is to have the memory-provoking photos afterward.

I always take my Nikon camera out with me to the garden bench swing. There’s not a lot new that I see from year to year, but I still take photos. I am entranced by what I see and I want to capture it. Everything in a garden points to the Gardener and I practically swoon over His artistry. But flowers aren’t people; taking photos of them doesn’t detract one bit from my immersion in the beauty.