Photographing A Christening While Studying the Reformation

A couple of weekends ago I had the unique opportunity to attend and photograph a Christening in the Catholic Church. This was an interesting event to attend while learning about the Catholic Church and the reformation. Most of my exposure to the Catholic Church and to Catholic people came while serving my mission in Mexico where I’d always run into some very dedicated Catholics every where I went, but actually participating in a religious ceremony with them a couple days ago opened my eyes. Their decorum in this ordinance and love for Christ and their love for love is explicitly evident and that cannot be denied. Though, I do not agree with the religious practices in the baby baptism, I still feel that what happens in those churches is a way of acting in faith even if it isn’t the way that I believe in. Those people chose to be in that room and I think the Lord sees that and accepts that faith acted upon. All of this brings me back to Martin Luther and his thoughts on faith. In “Martin Luther’s Conversion,” he mentions that “The righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written: the righteous shall live by faith.” This stands out because we all were created by God and He loves us and accepts our types of devotion to Him no matter what they are. This concept of sola fide is interesting to me. I might have this wrong, but my understanding is that the Protestants believed in this concept with Martin Luther and the Catholics were more the works part of faith. If the catholics were works based people back in the reformation, I believe that this has shifted in a way. I can see that these people had a lot of faith in their practices, but then again the question is, “does that faith only happen within a religious ceremony?” I guess that is a question that we can all ask ourselves. Do we really live what we believe or is it all to merely look a certain way. The reformation, even though it was a hard time for some people, it was a time where all faiths and beliefs were challenged. It served as a reminder that whatever was believed in needed to be firmly believed in to be able to last the test of time and pressure from the outside sources that were surrounding the religious people of the time.
Art in this stained glass window brought me to a familiarity that I couldn't feel within the ceremony, but it did remind me of Christ.