Last summer I started going to church. I hadn’t been in years. I didn’t know how to feel. There is always some pressure about going to church. What to wear? What will your dress suggest? Are you trying to hide something or to reveal something? Even in the quest to draw attention to the Lord, there will be attention on you, cameras, old friends, ect. They don’t call it Sunday Best for no reason.
Every thing about church produces some kind of anxiety to me. Where to sit… front, back, middle? Alcoves… Those spaces on the side don’t give you a clear view, but what am I trying to see with outer eyes anyway…
And then there is the whole issue of hugging. I always try to hug people before they hug me, as they might hug too long and border on groping. Aah the dilemmas.
But let me take a few steps back, as you might be wondering how I can say that I have not been to church in years. You’ve probably seen me in the church. But I wasn’t really a member. I was a camera operator. My job was not to worship, but to capture the most “interesting”, “glamorous” moments of church, to package them neatly and to sell them. To be a good church camera operator, you must know the church. The screamers, the wailers, the people that fall out in the spirit every Sunday, the people who wear new outfits just for you---- those are your money shots. Those are your friends.
Except you never actually talk to these friends. You memorize their habits… what time they come and with whom, what songs make them pull out their Blackberries, who they are texting and sexting in the pews, and what they think of other church goers. But you never talk to them; you only get close to them from behind the lens. It alters your personality, to see the world from behind a camera. You are always seeing people for what they will do and what they will become, how their behavior will manifest into a reaction that you want to capture on screen. You’re only as good as your last camera shot, and the audience is only good as their last reaction. Individuals are nothing except faces, predictable, boring faces. I have the whole church service memorized verbatim, down to the pastors walk, all of the prayers, the hymn and refrain, the nuances that soloists think are unique—I know what people do on camera and what they think, because I have spent over 2,548 hours looking at them from behind a lens.
Seeing life through this buffer makes it hard to take church unfiltered. I often find myself walking around the lobby; making sure people are still in their same seats, “proper places”. Is the lady that sits in the front right of the church still in the front right? If she moves to the left, my whole vision of church might fall apart.
It is taking time to look at church people as real people, not people that I can crop out or edit down to who I would like to see them as. It is taking time to look for God in a place that you have casually referred to as a stage, where you control the lights and sound and where one obscuring focus can change the meaning of a whole service. And it is taking time simply to talk to people who I have observed so long, all while pretending to be invisible to them.
“Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.” – Ralph Ellison “Invisible Man”
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