THE CELEBRATION OF PERFECTION

THE CELEBRATION OF PERFECTION
While doing boat-based whale-watching tours in Hermanus from 1997-99, I one day had the pleasure of hosting a very famous photographer. I could tell by the size of his camera equipment that he was not your average tourist. He explained to me that he needed to take only two photographs a year to cover his budget! I was thrilled to watch the artist at work. With fluent skill he would exchange lenses and film without missing a moment. On our way back to the harbour we saw a few hundred, maybe even a thousand or more, Cape Cormorants. The next moment they all took off in flight; the rhythm and unison of their wings were like ballet reflecting on the water. Our photographer was happily clicking away when suddenly he shouted: “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” It was wonderful to witness the joy in the man’s face. He knew that he had captured a moment that would perhaps be worth more than all his equipment put together. I watched him relax and enter his rest and understood that the Sabbath was a celebration of perfection, rather than a break from a busy schedule to observe a religious ritual! Gen.1:31. While he was carefully putting his equipment away, I became absorbed by the thought of photography; magic moments of light, shape, colour and movement arrested and stored on film to be reproduced countless times on glossy magazine pages. These galleries would be appreciated in any culture or language, at any time in the future. I imagined how the artist would file these gems in a way that nothing would be lost of the original picture; regardless of what would happen to the prints, whether they be framed, forgotten or destroyed. Almost like words storing images of rare beauty to be repeated at any time in any language or thought.

In one of her classic novels, Gentian Hill, Elizabeth Goudge paints the picture of little Stella listening to her stepfather reading from the Bible: “All through the Book, even in the dreadful parts, the language would now and then suddenly affect her like an enchantment. The peculiarities of Father Sprigg’s delivery worried her not at all. It was as though his gruff voice tossed the words roughly in the air separate particles of no great value, and immediately they fell again transmuted, like the music of a peal of bells or raindrops shot through with sunshine and vista beyond vista of incomparable beauty opened before the mind. It was a mystery to Stella that mere words could make this happen. She supposed the makers of these phrases had fashioned them to hold their visions as one makes a box to hold one’s treasure, and Father Sprigg’s voice was the key grating in the lock, so that the box could open and set them free. That transmutation in the air still remained as unexplainable as the sudden change in herself, when at the moment of the magical fall her dull mind became suddenly sparkling with wonder and her spirit leaped up inside her like a bird…” (See ‘Weighing Words’ in ‘God believes in you’)
For the first time in the age of the universe, the invisible Creator would display His image and likeness in visible form. Genesis 1:26. The mould of brilliance and perfection would be preserved for eternity in the Word that was from the beginning, in spite of Adam’s fall. Solomon saw a glimpse of this in Prov.8:22, “The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His work, the first of His acts of old, ages ago I was set up, at the first before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills were I was brought forth, I was daily His delight, rejoicing before Him always.” Your original value, the way God knew you before He fashioned you in your mother’s womb, is still intact! Through the preaching of the gospel of truth, the magic of that eternal moment is revealed again in the face of Christ as in a mirror, so that the light of life might dawn in us and we may behold Him face to face, and that we may know ourselves even as we have always been known. 2Cor.4:2-7, 1Cor.13:10-12.

Part of a booklet by Francois du Toit

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