Taken ... Blessed ... Broken ... Given ...

Taken … Blessed … Broken … Given …

One of the images St Paul employs in his letters, to help some of the earliest congregations of the Church to understand their new identity, is that they are ‘the body of Christ’ … Over several months, I have spent time with members of the congregation of Sunderland Minster, in the places where they are to be found throughout the week. As I watched them working and listened to their experiences, I was drawn to their hands, eyes and mouths … and to the tools that act as extensions of our hands, eyes and mouths … as well as to the ways in which the workplace overlapped with the home, and home-life spilled into work … The image that came to the fore was of the body of Christ: Taken and Blessed, as we gather together Sunday by Sunday and encounter Jesus in Word and Sacrament … and then Broken and Given, as we are sent back out into the world in ones and twos to love and serve the Lord and our neighbour … to be taken up again … At first I had intended to exhibit one photograph of each person I visited, as a means of celebrating ‘ordinarily extraordinary’ people … but as I looked through the images I had taken, the project became a series of photographs in groups of three. Like the body of Christ, these particular images are part of an ongoing work-in-progress, which will be added to over time …

the artist … Sarah

I visited Sarah at her home, where she showed me several pieces she had made, in different media. I was drawn to a pot she had fashioned from clay. The clay was scarred, and fired, and these processes had made it a thing of beauty. The pot itself was empty, a vessel, full of potential, waiting to be filled. The artist and her creation resonated with the rich biblical images of humanity … resonate with our humanity.

the solicitors … Hollie and Graeme

Husband-and-wife Graeme and Hollie work together at Hardings Solicitors, where Hollie is one of the Directors and Graeme is office manager. Hollie specialises in matters relating to Property and to Wills … our connections to place, and across time … Here professional and personal relationships are woven together … toys brought-in and left-behind by their sons … there is a sense of ‘family’ to the firm … And a commitment to justice as a universal righteous principle, and not a commodity to be bought by wealth.

the voluntary sector coordinator … Gillian

At the time I photographed her, Gillian was working for Age UK. She has since retired … Her team of volunteers made regular phone calls to elderly people at home, who might not otherwise have had that human contact. Encroaching isolation might be experienced as, to borrow a biblical image, entanglement in the cords of death. The play of hand with telephone cord suggests God’s intervention to set free … Conversely, the same action recalls another biblical image, our being knitted together by God in the womb … life, cherished …

the archaeologists … Becca and Chris

Daughter-and-father, Becca oversees a team of archaeologists, Chris volunteers on her dig … one generation serving, supporting, the next … and the past serving the present, by giving-up its stories, its wisdom and folly, offering corrective to the stories we tell in our search to be earthed … I joined them for one day, learning to patiently reveal pottery from the ground, from the ash and clay … bringing us full circle.

text and photographs … Andrew Dowsett