Yellow

Yellow window at First Unitarian Church, after Flower Communion.

Unitarian worship is a strange experience for a Catholic. There are small similarities and big differences. But the feeling of spiritual presence there is powerful. I sense that this is a congregation that loves one another and tries to spread that love throughout the community and throughout the world.

Flower Communion is an annual service that a Unitarian friend has been inviting me to for years. The flowers are blessed and distributed, as in Christian* communion services. My friend is not well, and I attended primarily to be in spiritual solidarity with her. It was wonderful to be able to stand beside her wheelchair with my hand on her shoulder, singing the Flower Communion hymn (sight-sung!) and praying for her. I had tears in my eyes.


I hoped to find something yellow at the church, though I dreaded the challenge of blipping yellow that was not a flower, a banana, a lemon, or any other cliché of yellow! (Flower Communion, but no flower blip. Ironic, eh?) I shot yellow flames in votive candles (iPhone not very successful at this), gold ornamentation on organ pipes (beautiful, but didn't fit my Contemplative Photography goal of simplicity), and various yellow walls and windows, of which there were, happily, lots.

Then I dreaded having to choose just one. You might say I was "yellow."
- Is it time to sign up for Flickr so I can share more than one photo? Please, not yet!
- Will my new Pic Stitch app let me show two photos at once, as I've done the past two days? Too cramped a format to show photographs that I'm learning to crop pretty well in the camera.
I sat in the Pearl Bakery sipping iced tea and protractedly staring at my iPhone, deleting shots that didn't make the grade. I even asked the advice of one of the baristas. Concluded after much dithering that I couldn't decide without a big screen.

The gating item was the CP goal of simplicity, which Seeing Fresh defines as "the experience of form in space." (For more on this, go here.) After adding a bit of iPhoto magic to my shots, throwing some away, and dithering further, I decided that this one best fit the simplicity objective.

Now I dread hearing what you think of my final choice.


Triple challenge:

YELLOW (DDW June)
DREAD (TerriG June)
SIMPLICITY (Contemplative Photography)


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*I hope I'm not offending anyone when I put it this way. Their website says, "Unitarian Universalist churches, including our beloved faith community, are founded on the mutual promises we make to one another about how we will live together rather than on a shared belief system or creed." I believe this congregation includes people who identify themselves as Trinitarian, Unitarian, atheist and humanist, and that they welcome people of any belief or none.