I Looked At Everyone Else In That Photo

It is a good photograph. Everybody says so.

Somebody put it in a frame, or it went on a wall, or it comes up on a screen every year and everybody in the family says something warm about it, and it is genuinely a lovely picture of a good day.

And you have never once looked at it as a picture.

You go straight to yourself. Then you go around the group. Then you come back to yourself, and there is an outcome, and the outcome is what you feel when somebody mentions that day.

That is not looking at a photograph. That is a review, and the photograph is the material.

I have sat with a lot of people who do this and hardly any of them have ever said it out loud, because there is no way to say it that does not sound self absorbed, and it is not self absorbed at all. It is closer to the opposite.

A woman who could not care less about herself would look at that picture and see her sister laughing. You cannot get there, and the reason is not vanity.

What a group photograph is not

Here is the mistake, and it is a category error rather than a moral one.

A group photograph is not a lineup.

A lineup is a set of people arranged so that they can be compared. Everybody the same distance from the camera, the same light, the same posture, facing forward, because the whole point is to make comparison possible.

Your family photograph is the opposite of that in every particular. People at different distances. Somebody half turned. One person mid sentence, one person mid laugh, somebody blinking, somebody in the shade, a child moving.

It was not built for comparison and it cannot support one. Every single variable that a comparison would need to be valid is uncontrolled in that image.

You are running a comparison in a picture that has never once been able to support one, and no group photograph has ever been a lineup. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman what an image actually is, and 1 Corinthians 12 has a body part comparing itself to another and being answered.

And there is a second thing that is quieter and sadder.

The ranking removes the day.

That photograph is a record of something that happened. Somebody said something funny just before it. Your aunt had been on a train for four hours. There was a dog. Somebody was worried about something and stopped being worried by the evening.

None of that reaches you, because the picture stopped being a record the moment it became a lineup, and the day it was made to keep has quietly gone.

You are losing a day every time you review the photograph of it, and the ranking has never once left room for the thing being remembered. Scripture in 1 Corinthians 12 has a foot comparing itself to a hand and the answer being that the comparison makes no sense, and the Spirit of God is the one who hands a woman a day back.

Because I am not the hand

Paul does something in 1 Corinthians 12 that is almost comic and entirely serious.

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? (1 Corinthians 12:15, King James Version)

He puts the comparison in a foot's mouth.

Because I am not the hand. Which is true. The foot is not the hand and never will be, and there is no version of a body where feet become hands.

And Paul's answer is not that the foot is secretly a hand, or that feet are just as good as hands really. His answer is: is it therefore not of the body? Which is to say, what has that got to do with anything?

The comparison is granted and then found irrelevant.

You are being told your comparison is accurate and beside the point, and there has never once been an answer in that chapter arguing the ranking backward. It is written in 1 Corinthians 12 that a foot saying it is not a hand is not therefore outside the body, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a woman's true comparison and shows her it decides nothing.

And notice what a body actually is, because it is the exact opposite of a lineup.

A body is a set of parts doing different things at the same time. The value of any one of them is entirely about its function and its place, and comparing two of them is a category error, which is why Paul can make it sound faintly ridiculous.

That group photograph is a body. Not a row of candidates. A set of people doing different things in one room on one day.

You are a part of a body rather than an entry in a competition, and there has never once been a photograph of a family that was a set of candidates. The Spirit of God is what turns a lineup back into a body in a woman's own eyes, and the written word says is it therefore not of the body.

Name what everybody was doing

So here is the assignment, and it will change what you see.

Look at one group photograph and name out loud what each person was doing that day.

Not what they look like. What they were doing, or carrying, or dealing with, or had just said.

He had driven since six. She had just found out about the job. That one is laughing because of what my father said. She was pregnant and had not told anybody. I made the food and I remember being tired and happy.

You are in that photograph as one of the people rather than as the subject of it, and no group has ever once been assembled in order to be graded. 1 Corinthians 12 says if the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body, and the Spirit of God is what puts a woman back among people instead of beside them.

Go round every person, including yourself, and give each one a verb.

Here is why it works. A comparison needs everybody to be the same kind of thing. The moment each person has their own day, their own errand and their own worry, they stop being comparable, because they are no longer in one category at all.

And you will find you cannot rank people you have just described.

You are able to break a ranking by giving every person their own day, and no comparison anywhere has ever once survived a set of verbs. The written word in 1 Corinthians 12 makes a body out of parts doing different work, and the Holy Spirit is what turns one photograph back into a memory rather than a lineup.