alan frost photography

Light out of Darkness

By alan frost on May 26, 2024

In the past few days I have been reading ‘Steeple Chasing – Around Britain by Church’ by Peter Ross. I am now about half way through the book and I am thoroughly enjoying both the content and the well written word. I can highly recommend it.

In the first chapter titled ‘Darkness’ two short passages spoke to me and in so many ways succinctly described my own feelings when visiting churches.

The first and I quote – “And so, as I grew older, I found myself drawn back – not to pray necessarily, but to sit for a bit, to poke around, to get in out of the rain. I began to appreciate the wisdom of John Betjeman’s words: ‘Church crawling is the richest of pleasures, it leads you to the remotest and quietest country, it introduces you to the history of England in stone and wood and glass which is always truer than what you read in books’”

In the second passage the author refers a visit to the Benedictine Abbey at Pluscarden in Scotland following the recent passing of his father. He writes – “…… it brought me a peace that I hadn’t felt for many weeks. I left far lighter than I had come. Was this a religious experience? I don’t know. Perhaps it was just being forced to spend long hours sitting in quiet. ‘It kind of gets inside you / The silence I mean,’ sings Linda Perhacs in her beautiful song ‘Chimacum Rain’, and old churches are like that. You are entering a building but really it is entering you.”

The six images shown here are a collection I have made over many years from visiting a variety of churches. I love to watch the light as it moves around, highlighting subjects which would otherwise be in virtual darkness. I endeavour to capture the feelings of stillness, of quiet and of solitude, prevalent in churches but not quite so easy to find elsewhere.

Perhaps it goes without saying that in the Bible the metaphorical meaning of light and darkness is often used to compare good and evil.

In John 1:5 “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”