Me > this

...Is, I believe, the medical term for my general state of being.

Now to discover what thing it is that I seek thus.

I don't think it is a person.

I'm reminiscing about this time last year, since I'm going through photos picking out some of the better ones for my mentor. Here are some general thoughts, photography-related and otherwise:

1) I don't really challenge myself to shoot like a journalist. I should get on that; a lot of these travel pictures are rather embarrassing. They look like they were shot by a tourist with a very fancy camera.
2) I have a helluva lot of photos.
3) There is a general theme of angst in my pictures - even in the post-processing. I was going through a high-contrast phase; also, my monitor was apparently calibrated a bit on the blue side since all of my images are a little bit yellow.
4) My pictures make me sad. I was pretty miserable for a while there.
5) My pictures also remind me of what I was thinking about at the time. Obviously, I was volunteering with a missions organization so during that time, religious emphasis was paramount. However, I'd just gotten back from China that past summer and had some misgivings about the "Oh, look at all these sad lost souls in the temple" mentality. I don't feel like that. Sorry, but I don't. I greatly prefer Taiwan's overly superstitious, slightly paranoid population to China's Communist, self-oriented people. It's not a prejudice/bias thing; it's probably a personal thing.

From a religious standpoint, I would postulate that it's far easier to discuss one particular deity with someone who already believes in their existence, rather than to argue with someone who believes there is no God. From a personal standpoint, I feel like I have more in common with people who look for significance and meaning behind life. I genuinely don't care what people believe as long as we share this search; I would make a terrible missionary, I know. I just want to hear about what they believe, and why they believe it.

You know how some people like to say, "We all believe in the same God; we just call him by different names"? While I don't believe that exactly, I think I believe in the gist of it. If I believe the Bible is true, and if I believe that God created all men in his likeness and that we all somehow long to be reunited with God despite our unworthiness, then I do believe that all men seek the same God. They might call him by different names. They might believe different things about him - he came to earth in human form and was reborn in three days; he attained Nirvana through good works; they might believe that there is some being out there benevolently smiling down on their puny antics; they might believe there is no God because there is no physical or scientific proof of him; they might believe that God has deserted them and hell and heaven are both here on earth. When fundamentalists of any religion reject everyone else's viewpoints as wrong, I always begin to question... Yes, this includes my own religion. I don't know why; I just do. I wasn't raised to be a cynic either, so that isn't it.

The best analogy I can think of is that old saying about the six blind men who went to see an elephant. Being blind, they used their hands to feel; one got the tail, one got the trunk, one got the body, one got the head. Obviously, everyone's respective experiences dictated their limited understanding of the creature. Usually, the moral quoted is that "Nobody knows." But here's the thing we often forget: Everyone knew SOMETHING; they just didn't agree on the consensus. Everyone knew that something existed, and everyone knew that something was different from themselves, and bigger than they were. And maybe instead of feeling out every single wrinkle in the creature in order to verify its existence and understand it from the outside-in, their time would be better spent figuring out how they could develop a relationship with it.

I, by no means, have figured out the Elephant I call God and my faith. I'm fairly sure I never will. It drives me wild with despair and almost ecstatic out of my mind by turns. Most of the time, it's just quietly there in the room (mwahaha). Somewhere out there. It's there, it is real, and I know it as clearly as I can see with my blind eyes.

Although I had an absolutely wonderful experience working for that missions organization last year, I realized that I personally can never "do" straight-up evangelization. I don't think that's what I'm supposed to do. I can't proselytize on a lifestyle or a hope of heaven or talk of the afterlife, because those are the parts of the Elephant that absolutely baffle me. It would be wrong for me to go out and talk about my encounter with the Elephant's trunk when I had only gotten around to his tail. I'm not saying that a trunk doesn't exist; I'm just saying that I don't understand the concept yet at this point.

On the other hand, it also seems pretty wrong to for me to sit around waiting to figure it all out before I talk about it. That would be like one of the blind men sitting down and saying, "I refuse to acknowledge the existence of Elephants because I can't see the damn thing." His inability to see is not the fault of the Elephant; it also does not make the Elephant vanish. It's entirely fair to voice his concerns over authenticity; it's fair to say that the tail felt a lot like rope and therefore, may just be one big hoax.

So I don't know. I feel like that's where I am with what I understand and know. I deeply admire people who speak with confidence, yet my blog is the epitome of wishy-washiness. Some days, that Presence hovers right there in my mind's eye; other days, it's fainter than my memories of last night's dreams. But I'm going to keep talking about it... "I might have seen an Elephant. I do not know. In good faith, I asked to be taken into the presence of one and despite my deepest suspicions, there are reasons to believe that mission was accomplished. I'm not going to know until I can see for myself, but I'm going to keep trying to figure it out."

I figure that if God was big enough to make the world and all the people in it, he's big enough to figure out a way to communicate his message to each person in his or her own way.

About a year ago, I was having a really bad day and the only thing that drew me out of my mental stress was a passage from C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Although a lot of people think he's kooky on this point, the idea of something bigger than what I had been taught to believe was what kept me from doing something stupid that day.

I'm no closer to having my photos picked out; I'm also no closer to an idea of what the hell I'm talking about. It's back to work for me. :P