1 Peter 3:21

Despite the fact that I grew up in Alabama in the heart of the Bible Belt, church was not a part of my family’s weekly routine and faith was never really talked about. All I knew about Christianity when I was young was that there was Jesus, and there was God, and there was something about a cross, but every fact outside of that was blurred. As I got older and got more curious, though, I began my own investigation through the Bible, vigorously reading, searching, and devouring every word in my pursuit of answers. It says in Matthew 7:7 to “ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you,” and for the most part, I found this to be wholly true. However, after much inquiry, there was one aspect of Christianity that continued to elude complete comprehension for me and was therefore somewhat unsettling in its inability to be fully grasped in its intricacies-- the act of baptism. I carried this curiosity with me into college, where I was given the opportunity to delve further into its exploration through a digital photography project focused on capturing my personal sublime.

A sublime was defined as something larger than oneself, awe-inspiring, and almost frightening in its vastness in either concept or form, and the act of baptism seemed to fit that description perfectly to me. In my attempts to compress the multifaceted metaphor of baptism into once piece in my photograph 1 Peter 3:21, I constantly struggled to decide upon an aspect of baptism to explore, a way to present it, and the message that I hoped to convey. However, once I decided to highlight this act’s ability to elevate otherwise ordinary elements and actions to the level of the spiritual and eternal, my fight became one with my professor and, perhaps most frustrating, with myself, ultimately revealing to me new levels of truth about my work ethic and the subject matter I was presenting.

Due to the overwhelming number of options for symbolism and visual metaphor, as well as the pressure I had placed upon myself not to disappoint my professor, there were times when the creative process felt like something vast, insurmountable, and frighteningly awe-inspiring, making it sublime in and of itself. The main theme of finding the spiritual in the ordinary also transcended the borders of my images to infuse my entire process, for I experienced everything first-hand that I had hoped to portray visually. I truly encountered God in the everyday activities of completing the project because I felt His healing and cleansing come into the insecurities I discovered along the way. Many times the lessons I learned, such as the fact that I should not fear failure, were actually lessons re-learned, for this knowledge had prompted my choice of sublime in the first place. It all just reminded me that, like 1 Peter 3:21, everything is a process, and that Christ will always be ready to meet my struggles and mistakes with a word of encouragement and a bar of soap.