Jesus Christ at Saltwater Creek
Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens. ~J.R.R. Tolkien
Faith… must be enforced by reason…. When faith becomes blind it dies. ~Mahatma Gandhi
Just north of Christchurch, perhaps 20 minutes or so out of town, is a place called Saltwater Creek. It is called that, because, after some reason, it has significance. State Highway 1 crosses on a bend in the river. As you pass, there is a small picnic area, perhaps a few houses, and the remains of what appears to have been a service station and automobile repair facility. Nobody appears to stop there, and in fact it’s perfectly understandable. There is very little reason to do so. But, after some reason I’m still attempting to understand, it has been sitting there in the background for most of my life. For the last 48 years or so, and one guise or another, I’ve driven through Saltwater Creek. Curiously, in all those years, I’ve never stopped, to stretch look around or consider my response to that place.
Until last week.
Saltwater Creek is not so much a “to” place, as a “through” place. I’ve never heard anybody say” I went to Saltwater Creek for a picnic, or for the weekend, or to a wild bacchanalia”. I’ve heard the odd person talk about driving through Saltwater Creek, or comment on the nature of the curve across the bridge. One of two of my friends have told me about getting a speeding ticket near Saltwater Creek. Not one of them has ever told me about going to Saltwater Creek.
Over the years I doubt if I have given Saltwater Creek more than a cursory glance. Most of the time, I suspect, I have not even done that. My mind has been occupied by the camper van that I’m desperate to pass, or I have been thinking about things to be done, places to go, or people to meet. You know, the usual things of life that sit in the front of your mind when you are driving long distance.
Until recently.
Until last week.
I was heading out the door, on my way to visit a friend in Hanmer, when a memory of having observed the scene sometime ago, and resolving that one day I would photograph it, suddenly popped up in front of me. So I picked up my camera off the desk and took it with me. I drove past the scene, but didn’t stop for a two reasons. I was focused on getting to Hanmer and anyway the light was coming from the wrong angle. I really needed late light to make the most of it. So I drove on.
The day progressed as it should and, somewhere near five o’clock, I climbed back into the HiLux and began the hour and a half journey back to Christchurch. With the stereo wound up and the soft beauty of the evening-illuminated landscape around me, I wasn’t thinking about Saltwater Creek. At all. That is, until somewhere just south of Amberley, I glanced down at the passenger seat and noticed my camera there. I was so focused on getting home to dinner, that I toyed with the idea of leaving it for another day. Mañana. There would always be another day. But the photographer in me noted that the light had just the right degree of softness to open the shadows but provide modelling in the brighter areas. And anyway, I had thought about this particular photograph long enough, so all my pre-visualisation was sitting there, becoming increasingly calcified. It was time to do it.
I pulled over, got out the camera and made perhaps 20 exposures. It might have taken me 3 to 4 minutes at most. Then I got back in and drove home. The thought occurred to me that perhaps I should have taken longer, perhaps I should have walked around some more, that perhaps I should have experimented more with my exposures or the framing. But there didn’t seem any real need at the time. The message was plain, so the technical aspects and the composition of the image kind of fell into place.
Processing it didn’t take that long either, since I had had a degree of clear previsualisation around the photograph. It was always going to be black and white, and I wanted the sense of having shot it with an old school black and white film, so I could reference photography’s documentary tradition. I turned out an A2 print just to check my Seeing. Firmly in the traditional documentary photography camp. But there was more.
Since I made it, The picture has continued to sit there, pinned to the wall and the front of my mind, irritating and disturbing me. Over the last week, whenever I have looked at it, something about it has been bugging me, wanting me to engage. It is as if the picture has more to talk about, as if it has a more profound story than just one about a rundown, disused service station, too close to the city for cars to stop on their way into town, but too far out for anybody living nearby to bring their car for attention. In some way I’ve had this sense of it as a metaphor, or perhaps an allegory.
Then over the last few days, a thought has begun to filter through. You see, it lies in the strange juxtaposition of the rundown garage, the old innocence and the general dereliction and shabbiness of the place. These things are in huge contrast to the bright statement written across the front of the garage awning. The message is eternal, around 2000 years old, and, while it may be written in paint that is crumbling and flaking, somehow the message remains bright and obvious. It is just that the structures containing it are mouldering away.
As long as I can remember, Christianity has been a part of my life, sometimes coming brightly to the front, but more often gathering dust in the background. And Christianity as a part of our social structure is pretty much the same. If you look for it, it can often be hard to find. Throughout Western European civilisation, churches are falling into disuse. With attendances at mainstream churches dropping at an alarming rate, you have to wonder how long it will be before the core Christian faiths shut up shop in the face of materialism and Mammon. At first glance you would think that the Christian message is on a hiding to nothing. People are not turning up to church for all sorts of reasons, which might include inconvenience, irrelevance or even a lack of belief. Many of the orthodox churches, if you visit them, seem to be populated by people who are not that far off getting the opportunity to test drive their faith by meeting the Creator face-to-face. It is almost as attending church is an optional extra for the retired or those close to it. After all, some might unkindly say, if Christian observance has become a consumer item, then what is the point of going to church anyway? What is the point of buying into the very scary teachings of Jesus Christ and their implications for life and belief, when the children have to be taken to sport on Saturday morning or a leisurely Sunday brunch passed up in favour of perceived obligation. Faith as duty, as obligation. And I am a slave to my job/family/life, so why should I give up my weekends, the only spare time I have?
Anyway, life is far too busy … is it not?
But here, on the side of the road, in a place you wouldn’t even look at a second time, and one which really doesn’t justify having its own name, the message stands out firm and clear. The message shouts brightly, even though the structures around it are crumbling and fading away. In time somebody will come along with a very large bulldozer and demolish the lot. Perhaps they will erect a cafe and “Art Gallery “(not a bad idea when you consider that there is a whole township being built just around the corner), and people will come to elegant lunches. and probably on the first pass of the bulldozer, the awning which once sheltered people as they filled their petrol tanks and heavy windscreens cleaned, will collapse, and the letters which brightly proclaim the truth will split and shatter in an unseemly shower of brittle fibreboard. And the message will go.
Or will it?
Here, it seems to me, is the real message which has been bugging me for the last 10 days or so, the metaphor contained within the photograph, the message in the medium. In fact, the message will remain, firm, clear and unchanged. And unchangeable. The same message which has been broadcasting for nearly 2000 years, a clear voice singing in the darkness, will remain. Granted, it will now be will apparently non-existent, hidden behind the latest architectural design and obscured by the hiss of a four-group coffee machine. But it will be there.
Nothing lasts forever. Well nothing man-made, that is. The traditional churches are under increasing pressure, if falling attendances and increasingly-ageing congregations are anything to go by. Extrapolate the trend and you might logically expect that with an a few short years the mainstream Christian churches will have faded away, that Methodism and Anglicanism will have joined Zoroastrianism in the dusty halls of historical irrelevancy. It seems to matter little whether they trend towards more conservative and traditional practices (Roman Catholicism) or whether they embrace the bright rock-band surface enthusiasm of the fundamentalist churches. Attendances at Western churches (Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic) is on the decline. Rather like the faded glory of the garage at Saltwater Creek. And perhaps it may come to pass that they fade away along with the Age of Pisces. Or they do not and suffer a glorious resurrection.
What is important is the message. For 2000 years, nearly 2 millennia, that one simple statement has remained, unchanged. Human beings, driven by their need to make God in their own image, have adopted and adapted Him for all manner of reasons; power, influence, a helping hand in hard times, a guide to right living. The message is however simple, unequivocal. You accept him as Lord. Or you do not. You accept the statement, with all the obligation and potentially terrifying journey that is involved, or you choose to walk away. For whatever reason, you decide that Jesus Christ is not Lord. And you make your own decisions based on that. However the message is the same one which has drawn people for 2000 years and will, no doubt, continue to do so for another 2000. Unchanged, immutable, pure. Churches will come and go, cathedrals will rise and fall, self-proclaimed prophets will come offering a better destiny, rise before the weak and gullible, and then be found wanting, but the message will remain.
As I sat there, looking at the photograph I had made, I began to unpick the metaphor, to unravel the Truth which lay nestled up and purring inside this photograph. I began to see one potential explanation.
The confusion here lies between the message and the medium. The crumbling garage with its faded sign offering fertiliser for sale, and the dodgy old Nissans could be seen as a metaphor for the orthodox church. If Jesus Christ is Lord, then why are his supposed representatives on earth doing so badly? Why is organised Christianity in such a parlous state? Surely this means that the Christian faith is irrelevant, and those of us who seek to follow God would do well to follow faiths which appear to be in much better health, for example Buddhism and Hinduism? Perhaps we should all become Moslems or practice Shinto? Should I check out Sufi? Maybe they are onto the REAL SECRET. Choice. Religion as consumption. If the churches are fading and no young people are going, perhaps it means that human beings have finally realised that all along it was a brainwashing trip designed to keep a few people living in the style to which they wanted to become accustomed.
A cynic might say that. The disaffected would definitely say that. Those who, deep down, realise how profoundly true and how frightening the implications of acceptance of this simple statement may be, will definitely want to say that. It doesn’t change anything in the message. The message remains, every bit as powerful and profound as it was on that day when Jesus came out of the hills and preached the Sermon on the Mount.
Truth is truth. It can’t be changed, altered, edited. I am. You are. It is. Approach the verb to be at your peril. The truth contained here will change you forever.
Do you dare?
The core remains, along with the choice to believe and follow. Faith, pure and simple. Take it or leave it.
The only choice we really have.
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