Journey into seeing
Last week I was in London meeting a friend and this white bicycle caught my eye chained to the railings with the words life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away. I’m a visual person so I just had to get my camera out which I tend to carry with me at all times and take a photograph. I met the friend and after coffee we walked back to the tube past the bike. As we walked past I was waiting for her to notice it but she didn’t so I pointed it out as I thought it was so brilliant - I’ve since found out it’s a ghost bike. She liked it and was surprised when I said I’d already seen and photographed it. Her passing comment was that if I hadn’t said something she would not have seen it… which got me thinking how many things in front of our eyes don’t we see?
The most fun and perhaps shocking illustration of this is the genius cycling awareness advert the moonwalking bear. Watch the advert before reading on… How can we fail to see what is in front of our eyes? Perhaps seeing or looking is a discipline that we can learn or get better at. The mystics talk about awareness and learning to cultivate it through our senses being present in the blade of the moment. It’s actually one of the reasons I love photography. It helps me see, actually look at things, see differently - trying to explore a fresh angle or finding a way to make the ordinary look beautiful.
On the Sunday worship programme we heard the story of Blind Bartimaeus receiving the gift of his sight back when he met Jesus Christ. I jotted down a sentence I really liked that was used to introduce it - when we learn to see differently we learn to see God’s world in a new light. A youthworker in Cheltenham doing detached work on an estate told me a story of one of the lads he was working with. His sense of value and worth was fairly low and he would walk with his eyes down. Richard (the youthworker) felt there was a real breakthrough when this lad pointed out the hills surrounding Cheltenham that he had never noticed before even though they had been there his whole life! He had begun to see differently, he was lifting his horizon. That story prompted me to write a song that captures this idea of encounter with God helping us to see differently, to see the world charged with the presence of God, to lift our horizons. It’s an old tune now from the album Grace (see proost) but you can have a listen here or download the track for free. The lyrics are below (the second verse includes a quote from Mike Riddell’s wonderful book Godzone).
I lived in the shadows preventing me see
Though you were there you weren’t visible to me
But you came into my world and pointed out the trees
Helped me to encounter your mystery
I had seen the hills a thousand times before but it took someone to point them out to me
I had see the hills a thousand times before but it took someone to point them out to see
Now you’re waving in the trees
Laughing in the thunder
Dancing in the rain
Shining in old eyes
Crying in the breeze
Speaking in the silence
Your presence everywhere
The world is full of you
posted by jonny baker
Tags: lent
Week 1 - Journey into Seeing | Jonny Baker March 3, 2009
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Sense Making Faith - Lent 2009 » Journey Into Touching — March 24, 2009 @ 10:25 pm
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By John, March 7, 2009 @ 8:24 am
Been thinking about seeing all this week since last Sunday’s programme. An interesting week for me to do it, as I’ve been in and around Bristol speaking at different meetings about the spiritual search of our culture. Began in Weston by encouraging a very mixed Churches Together group to see Jade Goody through God’s eyes - her desire to be married, get her sons and herself baptised before she dies, but going to the heterodox bishop of the Open Episcopal Church - all of it seemed so typical of many in our culture desperately searching for spiritual meaning but not quite knowing how to connect with traditional church. It’s fair to say that some of the good folks there found it hard to regard Jade in that way. But the really good news for the church has to be that the staff and students of Trinity College were absolutely grabbed by the idea of seeing the world through the eyes of God, and four students spent half the afternoon talking with me about how that can inform and inspire creative engagement with the culture. When ordinands and those who are training them start seeing things differently, that has to be really good news for the church and its mission. It’s not all bad news …
By Eileen, March 7, 2009 @ 9:08 am
Thank you for the blog. Here is a link to an explanation of ghost bikes - http://www.ghostbikes.org/