Editorial June 11, 1984 Issue

Look to a deeper realism

ALLISON W. PHINNEY, JR.

When I was a teen-ager just becoming interested in photography, a neighbor of mine offered to become a mentor. One summer afternoon I rushed out of the house after a thundershower to capture the unusually bright, full arc of a rainbow on film. My neighbor was there, too. We began to compare camera settings. I was surprised his were so different from what I would have expected, so I asked him what kind of film he was using. "Well," he said after an embarrassed pause, "I'm using black and white." Unlike the sophisticated camera buff who might have planned it that way, he just forgot!

At the present time much of the world is approaching spiritual values and spiritual reality from the standpoint of the neighbor with his black-and-white film. The result may be difficult to distinguish from the general gray of a material sense of existence!

As Dag Hammarskjöld, the great Swedish statesman and an early Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote in his book Markings: "God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."^{ Markings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. 56 .}