“Meandering on the beach with a camera is the outward activity of an inner urgency…”

Wave washed pebbles are amongst my desultory enthusiasms. Desultory because to enjoy and fully appreciate a pebble beach you need time, slowed down pace, attentiveness and a significant level of unstructured and undirected meandering. You also need the background rattling and chattering of stones shaping each other by the endless rhythmic friction of waves and tidal currents.

Enthusiasm because it requires time and effort, and a willingness to go looking for the joy of seeing what no one has ever seen before, and realising, that no one will ever see it again. That particular arrangement of stones and pebbles, in this particular light, at this particular moment, feeling as I do gazing and seeing what is there, is unique and unrepeatable in it configuration of time, circumstance, climate and the inner mood of the observer.

Recently I've taken to photographing the changing micro-geography of a pebble beach being rearranged by the brushing and pushing of the waves. The dancing of sunlight and shadow, the highlighted colours and tones, the diversity of shape and size, create an infinite range of possibilities. And yes, that moment can be captured, but only partially, by a digital camera. Still there is in the photo the fixing of an image of a moment, which can be revisited and contemplated.

On any one beach there are milions of stones, from rocks to boulders to pebbles, a geological kaleidoscope that has been millions of years in the making. And into that long story of time and movement, steps a man with a camera, and freeze frames a micro-second which he later ponders and studies in order to awaken wonder, and perhaps prayer.

Contemplative prayer is likewise a moment of eternity paid attention to. Over a lifetime, millions of thoughts and experiences, retained in memory, forgotten, or suppressed, become part of the person we are aware of ourselves being. Like the infinite possibilities and endless configurations of pebbles moved and placed, moved and replaced, arranged and rearranged by the rhythms of waves, tides and seasons, there is an equivalent movement in the inner motions of heart and mind on the shoreline of our own peculiar spirituality.

I've written before about the spirituality that gives focus to the attentive looking of the photographer. Whether landscape or rose, seascape or lichen, bird in flight or comvine harvester, human artefact or nature's masterpieces, streets with cars or a loch populated by geese, what we choose to see matters. My recent enthusiasm for photographing stones is one more way of awakening wonder at the times and circumstances of my own life. Contemplating those mysterious movements of the waves, shifting and rearranging pebbles and stones, that wonder becomes also a deeper wondering about the forces that have shaped me, and placed me where I now am.

Perhaps meandering on the beach with a camera is the outward activity of an inner urgency, seeking to understand the mystery of a human life, my life, as it is confirgured and reconfigured in ways I don't always plan, and wouldn't necessarily choose. Perhaps too, the life of faith is about taking time to contemplate, pray, and seek to understand and appreciate that particular arrangement of time and circumstance that is my life now, and to be grateful that out of the infinite possibilities of existence, I am still here.

I don't think of God as the great arranger and rearranger of my life as if my own decisions, responses, loves and hopes could simply be over-ridden by a well meaning providence.The love that moves the sun and other stars is a love that in the relationship of love, holds all that he has made within a purpose that is liberating, redemptive, renewing and into which in Christ God has entered as life-giver. Whatever the outcomes of life, whatever the changing arrangements of the pebbles on the beach, "He who did not spare his own Son, but freely gave him up for us all, will he not, with him, graciously and freely give us all things." I have no idea what those "all things" will look like – but I trust the waves and tides and seasons to shape and place me, finally, within the eternal love that gave me life in the first place.