Faith is often least understood when our footing is firm and most clearly revealed when that footing gives way beneath us. It does not spare us the furnace, nor prevent the fiery arrows from being loosed. Rather, it offers the quiet assurance that when our own strength fails, we need not stand alone. The language of faith is therefore often couched in the language of trial. We are tossed and driven upon restless seas. We call for a hand to lead us through the darkness, not with the certainty that suffering will pass us by but with faith enough to continue when we can no longer see the way forward. Darkness need not mean abandonment, nor weakness defeat. Sometimes the act of pressing on is itself the profession of belief.
We often imagine such demonstrations of faith on the grand stages of scripture and history, as if they require a fiery furnace before they can be revealed. Yet, in the years I have spent photographing the Mississippi Delta, I have more often encountered it in ordinary lives. In people rising each day to meet circumstances that have given them every reason not to. Their faith seldom announces itself. It is simply lived day by day.
And in this sense, perhaps faith is not best measured by how firmly a person stands but by what allows them to rise when they fear they cannot.
Thibodeaux’s work is featured on the cover of the Religion issue.
Header image: Birds in Field, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 2010. A murmuration of starlings swarms over a harvested field in December. These birds are a common sight in the Delta after the fall harvest, and I never grow tired of watching their graceful dance as they forage for fallen seed. Just a few months prior, the stalks would have swayed to their own rhythm, blowing about in a northerly wind that was bringing in the winter. But these little birds, in all their hunger, remind me of the song that continues on long after the last stalk is withered and gone.
Brandon Thibodeaux is a photographer and educator based in Houston, Texas, who creates portraits in the documentary tradition. In addition to his assignment work and creative commissions, he explores life in the American South, including in a long-term photographic project based in the Mississippi Delta, When Morning Comes, which was later published as In That Land of Perfect Day (Red Hook Editions, 2017). His work has been featured in American Photo, Oxford American, and the New York Times, among others, and his prints are held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Telfair Museums, Savannah; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; and various private collections, including The Do Good Fund, Inc.
