Sometimes icons, symbols, nature, and art can take us where words cannot. We read them by allowing them to read us. This, I think, is its own kind of prayer. On the way down the mountain, having felt something in my soul that had been mostly numb since February, I took a photo of the chapel.
My camera captured something I hadn’t noticed in the glare of the sun at the Chapel of the Holy Cross: a sun dog bending over the chapel, almost like an eye gazing outward toward the heavens. I look at the photo often. It reminds me of the bronze crucifix and its outward gaze upon my life, as the cross somehow contains all the prayers I cannot yet pray.
—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “Let Us Pray: When Words Fall Short“
by Stephen Copeland
