The Photographs Show A Woman Glowing

There are nineteen of them and they are in a shoebox with a picture of a shoe on it that has not contained a shoe since about 1998.

Her sister took them. Her sister is not a photographer and half of them are crooked and in four of them somebody's arm is across the corner of the frame.

But there is one.

It is the seventh in the sequence, and it is the moment just after, and in it there is a woman with her head tipped slightly back and her eyes shut and her mouth open, and water down her whole face, and she is laughing, or something adjacent to laughing, and she is unmistakably, undeniably, lit from somewhere.

Everybody who has ever seen it says the same word. They say "Look at you."

And she has no memory of being that woman.

That is the whole difficulty and it has taken her twenty-six years to be able to say it in a sentence. She remembers the day in general. She remembers her sister's shoes and the smell of the hall and a hymn she has never liked. She remembers being cold.

She does not remember anything that would account for the face in photograph seven.

So she is in the peculiar position of holding physical evidence about herself that she cannot corroborate. It is not that she thinks it is fake. It is her face. It is simply that the woman in that picture appears to have received something, and the woman holding the picture has no record of it, and the two of them have been staring at each other across a shoebox for twenty-six years.

She is fifty-four now.

And what she does, about twice a year, is take the box down, and go through the nineteen, and stop at the seventh, and look at it for longer than she would ever admit to, and then put it back. And what she is doing, if she is honest, is trying to remember her way into it, and it has never worked, and she has come to a quiet conclusion about that which she has never spoken.

The conclusion is: whatever that was, it did not stay.

What a photograph can and cannot hold

Let me say something about that photograph that I think will change what you do with it.

It is a very good piece of evidence about one second.

That is not a criticism of it. It is what a photograph is. It caught a face in an instant and it has held that instant faithfully for twenty-six years, and it is the reason nineteen people have said "look at you" in your kitchen.

But it cannot tell you anything about the twenty-six years, and here is the thing you have not considered: it never could. Not even if you remembered the second perfectly. A second is a second. Your conclusion, whatever that was, it did not stay, is a conclusion about duration drawn from an instrument that only measures instants.

Now let me put the frame that Scripture puts around all of this.

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.2 Corinthians 4:18

Read the last clause slowly, because it inverts what everybody assumes. The seen things are the temporary ones. The unseen things are the ones that last.

A photograph is about as seen as a thing can be. And what it caught, gloriously, was the temporal edge of something whose actual body was in the register that does not photograph.

You are looking at the one part of that morning that was always going to fade, and mourning that it faded, and that is not my clever reframe, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the conclusion rather than on your general agreement with 2 Corinthians.

Now let me say something about the trying to remember your way in.

Twice a year for twenty-six years you have taken down a box and attempted, by looking hard enough, to reconstruct an interior from an exterior. It has never worked, and it was never going to, and I want you to hear that as relief rather than as failure.

You cannot get in that way. Nobody can. Memory does not run backwards from a photograph, and a face does not store what was happening behind it.

You are not a woman who lost something. You are a woman who was given something in the eternal register and photographed at the temporal edge of it. Scripture says the unseen things are the lasting ones, and the Spirit of God has been the unseen thing in you for twenty-six years, and He does not appear in any of the nineteen, including the crooked ones.

I want to say one more, about the word everybody uses.

Look at you. Nineteen people, over twenty-six years, standing in your kitchen holding a crooked photograph and saying the same two words.

You have been receiving a testimony about yourself twice a year and filing it as a photograph. The word says the unseen is eternal, and the Spirit is the one in whom it is held, and the reason the face in the seventh photograph looks like that is that something happened, and something happening does not stop having happened because the second it happened in has gone.

You are carrying the part that lasted, and it was never the part the camera could reach. Scripture says the things which are not seen are eternal, and the Holy Spirit is the unseen thing that has been in you for twenty-six years.