I passed out once in church. Stood up and kneeled down one too many times until the blood couldn’t keep up—I was struck to the ground right there in the pew. By that time I had already stopped believing, but imagine what a younger me would have made of this annihilation.

I spent my childhood in churches: I was raised Catholic because that’s how my dad was raised. My mom’s family, who made the Depression-era journey to California, weren’t beholden to the old church, they were Christian Scientists and Disciples of Christ, reworked strains adapted to the new American context. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to miss the pause that Mass created in the week, the time separate from school and work, certainly separate from pleasure. Those of us who have moved away from religion have left behind frameworks for understanding life and death that provided solace and structure, that gave us a way of looking at the world that was defiantly not of this world. That doesn’t mean we’ve given up trying to find meaning in all this.

The images from this series record my journey back into the landscape of faith. It is a documentation of light and darkness, but the camera's experience of light is different from our own. The world it captures is like the one we live in, but slant. It can see things we can’t.