Thursday I had an all day shoot in New York City. The night before I drove to a hotel just over the Hudson, in NJ, and got up early to drive into town. I do this most of the time when I have a shoot in a larger city, just so I can wander the streets with my camera and capture the day. I also often linger long after the shoot is done, to capture the night.

It was foggy Thursday, and rain fell off and on. The city was particularly dirty and gray and the always spectacular skyline faded into the fog. At one point, I saw a church, St Francis of Assisi, and went in.

I love spiritual spaces, and love to capture them on camera. Small country churches. Cathedrals. Temples. They all sing to me in a way few spaces do. But this was no empty church, they were beginning to have mass, so I stayed and worshiped with them in their lovely, bright inner city cathedral.

It was a dazzling sanctuary  I can well imagine the city dwellers of the 1920’s coming in here to worship, out of the soot and drab of an early industrial age city to this place of gold and light. Music rising like mystery through the columns. Candles everywhere.

Compared to where they lived their every day  lives, it must have felt like a glimpse of heaven. In fact, it still does.

I am not Catholic, and I don’t know the rituals, responses or when to stand or sit. But none of that bothered me. The place itself, it’s light and mood, brought me to my own moment of worship. The sermon was universal. So was the sense of God-with-us.

Forty five minutes later, the worship was done. And I went outside to this, (take from the front doors of the church.) Gray again. The fog and walls high and dark. 

No matter. Worship, like inspiration, carries over. That is part of why we worship, because that presence stays with us, even in the dark of the world we live in. That light sustains.

I often wonder what people who have no faith, do. How do they keep their spirits high? How do they weather the storms of life. What do they draw on when life seems overwhelming and beyond them? I have a good imagination, but honestly, I can’t imagine it.

And I don’t want to.

Tom