The Most Political Act
Dear All Souls,
This week, Pastor Brendan and I were in Holland, Michigan, gathered with a small community of friends for the Doxology Conference hosted by the Eugene Peterson Center for Pastoral Imagination.
Our guides were a strikingly varied group: novelist Marilynne Robinson, whose words make the soul ache for clarity; devotional songwriter Jon Guerra, whose music feels written for this very moment; Gisela Kreglinger, who grew up among the vineyards of Bavaria and writes with rare depth about the spirituality of wine; my bishop, Chris Green, whose teaching always leaves me seeing Scripture with new eyes; and Asher Imtiaz, a documentary photographer whose art is a prayer for attention.
It is Asher I find myself returning to in these days since the conference. Born and raised in Pakistan, he moved to the United States in 2012 to pursue graduate studies. His early work centered on documenting religious minorities in Pakistan, but his camera now turns toward immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers rebuilding their lives here.
Asher’s photographs are not only images. They are acts of friendship, of protest, of faith. He told us the story of a woman named Shireen (pictured above), a Yazidi survivor of the ISIS attack on northern Iraq in 2014. To avoid being assaulted, she pretended to be mute and disabled, was tortured to prove she was faking, sold five times, and eventually freed. She now lives in the United States, waiting for news of her missing brothers, still carrying the dream of becoming a lawyer.
Asher’s photograph of Shireen is luminous with sorrow and resilience. During his session he said, “My photographs are a protest of sorts for the humanity of those we see and name as ‘other.’ What began as a photograph has become friendship, a testimony of trust and attention. But attention is more than a strategy; it is a form of love.”
A few minutes later he quoted filmmaker Wim Wenders: “The most political decision I make is where to direct people’s eyes.”
That sentence has stayed with me. Haunted me may be a better descriptor. Because, dear friends, that is part of our calling too. We are asked, as followers of Jesus, to decide where to direct our gaze.
Jesus knew where to look.
He looked at those everyone else overlooked: the poor, the sick, the Samaritan, the woman at the well, the tax collector in the tree. And just as often, He directed the eyes of His followers. Look at the lilies. Look at the birds of the air. Look at the woman who gave two small coins. Look at the least of these. Over and over, He invited them, and still invites us, to see what He sees and to learn love through attention.
We cannot love what we refuse to see. We cannot see those we have already labeled. To see is to care. To care moves us toward action. And to act rightly, we must first be still long enough to see what is true.
This is, in Asher’s words, the ministry of presence. The seeing that precedes doing, the attention that opens the door to love. To see is to stay. To stay is to love. And to love, we must learn to be still.
Perhaps that is one of the Spirit’s invitations for us in this season at All Souls: to look again. To practice seeing with the eyes of Christ. To direct our attention toward those stories that might otherwise go untold, and to trust that in paying attention, we are already participating in the healing of the world.
This Sunday after the liturgy, we will hold our IMPACT House Meeting in the sanctuary. These gatherings are one of the ways we practice seeing together. They help us listen for the stories of our own community, and to discern where the Spirit is calling us to act for justice in Charlottesville. I invite you to stay after the liturgy, to join the conversation, and to lend your voice to this shared work.
Peace & All Goodness to you,
Bliss +
p.s. - You can read several more stories like Shireen's here, and can find more of Asher’s work on his website and follow him on Instagram.
p.s.s. - If you have not yet, give Jon Guerra’s albums “Kingdom of God” and “Jesus” a listen.