the power of photgraphs

Maybe I’m just sensitive these days but when I was scrolling through buzzfeed’s list of the 45 most powerful images I got to this image and burst into tears.


Christians protect Muslims during prayer in Cairo, Egypt.

See the thing is I’m not a big fan of religion, in fact one of my favorite sayings is “God looked down on His people and said ‘as a gift to my people, who I love so much, I will give them the gift of religion.’ To which the Devil spoke up and said ‘ooooh, and I’ll organize it.’” I am sure many people who, like me, were raised Catholic can say they took away to major things from that religion; the ritual and the harshness. I’m not even sure why I feel a sense of severity because I was so young when I was involved with the Church, but it’s there. Hell (I mean…heck), for a long time I had a hard enough time dealing with the idea of monotheism and the word God itself. But I wanted it!

For whatever reason, my Catholic upbringing or just my DNA, I struggled for a long time with faith, or rather my lack of faith. I wanted with the entirety of my being to have faith in something, anything! But nothing ever felt right, there was always too much dogma or worse too much wooing- the places you go to that are so obviously trying to appeal to the people and not even trying to promote ‘the good word.’ And speaking of the good word, that’s another reason I was seeking religion, because wanted to be a student. I wanted a wiser more learned individual posing thought provoking questions to me about love and compassion and maybe even a good moral tale thrown in every now and again for amusement.

And then I got into yoga, like really got into yoga, in fact this was a few years after I went to yoga school. I realized through some reading of ancient and modern texts that there was less of an emphasis on NAMING a god as there was to BEING FAITHFUL to a god. The teachings and practices of yoga seemed (to me at least) to align themselves with nearly every faith I had looked at or too for guidance. And for the very first time in my life I felt ok being a spiritual being and not necessarily a religious one. I even started using the word God again (by the way that’s bigger than it relates in this blog) and I didn’t worry or feel inauthentic about not being able to name that God.

So why this picture, why is this the 1 of the 45 most powerful images of 2011 that brought me to tears? I think it’s because this image relates the one thing throughout all of my religious struggle I never really stopped believing in and that is spirit. Whether it’s the human spirit or the Holy Spirit or the spirit of freedom and solidarity, I just knew on some level there was something out there bigger than me, bigger than all of us. So too see people standing together displaying what for so long I had no words for, it profoundly impacted me. People who proudly proclaim a religion, one set in its beliefs that it is the way, joining hands to protect others who proudly proclaim a different religion from their own. It should make you cry, it should resound across the borders (external, internal or otherwise) and shake the foundation of all those who commit terror in the name of faith. It is the people joined together in spirit that is religion and that is more beautiful than a thousand churches and more powerful than a thousand bombs and summed up quit poetically in this, one of the most powerful images of 2011. Enjoy and may the Spirit be with you…

…(this is where the Catholics say, “and also with you.)

J