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Saints Peter & Paul
9 January 2024
Saints Peter & Paul, the largest church in North Beach, is celebrating its centennial this year. The current building, that is. So we thought we'd take a portrait.
Saints Peter & Paul. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens at 26mm (52mm equivalent), f13, 1/250 second and ISO 200. Processed in Camera Raw.
Our family goes back to 1860 here, well before this church building's cornerstone was laid in 1924. But it has been the site of our weddings and funerals for over a century now.
Those are stories for another time, though.
We refrain from shooting, let alone publishing, images of religious buildings. The buildings tend to have their own agenda, of course, apart from what might have drawn our lens to them.
But this serene edifice, seen from across Washington Square, only quotes Dante on it facade. The quote is from the first three lines of Paradiso, the third canticle of La Divina Commedia." With a translation by Allen Mandelbaum:
La gloria di colui che tutto move
per l'univeerso penetra, e rispende
in una part più e meno altrove.The glory of the one who moves all things
permeates the universe but glows
in one part more and in another less.Were Spinoza your tour guide, he'd suggest that "the one" might be not a being but simply being, or life itself, which animates our world in various degrees. A simple observation no one would dispute.
And in our search as photographers for something to train our lens on, isn't that what we are looking for? Some evidence, more or less, of beauty in this world?
Blessed are the photographers who celebrate the beauty we find, even if "in one part more and in another less."