Landscapes of the Sacred Reflection 2- Jamie Englert

In class we discussed the ordinary as a mask of the holy. “I seldom make myself fully present to those occasions when the ordinary whispers of the holy,” Lane states in Landscapes of the Sacred (67). We miss the holy in our everyday lives because we are so accustomed to the commonness or as Lane says, “the ordinary also conceals—by the very fact of its ordinariness. It anesthetizes the mind with its dull predictability” (69). A few weeks ago I woke up early to go to historical Yorktown to get away from campus for a bit and be alone. I got there and had the anticipation that it would be a profound experience. Sitting along the river, I tried to be content and be in the moment. That was the problem, I was trying too hard. The wind was blowing hard and I was freezing, with my thoughts focused on how cold I was and the frustration of my inability to be still. I had brought my camera hoping to get some good shots of the water or landscape; however, nothing I took seemed to be good enough. I was losing patience and the time was passing with more and more people around, adding to my limitations. After failing at getting a good shot from the pier, I walked to the sidewalk in dismay and saw a family just in front of me. A little boy was on his bike while his parents were on either side, helping him along. Their backs were to me as I carelessly took a shot without meticulously adjusting the shutter speed or aperture like I usually would. When I went to review the picture, I was taken aback for a minute. Yes, it was just a picture of a family together, but it showed so much more. The family was silhouetted against the landscape and evoked such simplistic beauty of the moment they were in. Rather than capturing a meek picture, I unconsciously captured a moment in these people’s lives. Even though there were not faces in the picture, the emotion still radiated. This family could have passed by me earlier and I would have thought nothing of it.

This family represented the ordinary. There were tons of people around, families and friends of all ages, with nothing in particular standing out. I had been looking for something special, to capture something of beauty or abstraction that had insightful meaning. But when I stopped looking so hard for one second--that is when the real beauty was revealed. The ordinary revealed the holy. This simple image of a mom and dad teaching their son how to ride a bike was so innocent and yet possessed incredible power. Parents’ teaching their kids how to ride a bike is a normative, common experience yet can be seen as so much more. The kid has to trust their parents that they will keep him/her safe and the elation they experience when finally learning how to ride alone can be experienced by all three together. That raw joy in such a simple act, I believe, is holy. Love is so evident. When I stopped overlooking the familiarity of my surroundings, I saw more than I could have asked for.