Robert Epley

For nearly a lifetime I worked hard at doing what seemed right. This kept in the background some general feelings I had. These feelings were an interest in doing more about worship and my spiritual life. It was like background music that I noticed from time to time, but I never turned up the volume.

The insistence I felt about worship and my spirituality increased in intensity not long ago. After several attempts at various things, I began the first year of Education for Ministry and a study of the Old Testament. In the context of writing my Spiritual Autobiography a number of my photographs taken throughout the years took on new meaning for me.

These photographs became insights into my life that until recently I wasn’t able to comprehend. I now see them as encapsulating cogent descriptions of my life at the moments in which they were made. I now understand why these images resonated so strongly when I took the pictures and why they continued to draw me back to them.

From this I became curious about pictures I had taken more recently. What insights could I get from them? The pictures became a mirror held up for me to see myself. It was like watching myself in a play. The foreground field in the collage became a stage. On that stage picture subjects became the actors playing out a scene. Questions explored by the actors on the stage were the question I was exploring.