Many years ago, I was introduced to the African belief that when someone takes a picture of you, they steal your soul. Several years later, I forgot this fact and it wasn’t until yesterday that I was forced to remember.
My team was at a supermarket in Lusaka, Zambia trying to buy groceries for the next few days. One of my teammates, Eric, was trying to buy bread in a large crowd of people. After he pushed his way to the counter, I thought it would be cool to get a picture of him buying bread in an African supermarket. I got my camera out, ready for the shot. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure if my flash was on or not, but I didn’t think it would be too big of a deal if it wasn’t. Obviously, I was terribly wrong.
The moment I snapped my picture, this bright light from my flash went off, and before I knew it, I had a very angry crowd of African men and women glaring, shouting, and pointing at me. One of the men walked up and lectured me about how wrong and rude it was to take a picture of a bunch of people, even though I was really just aiming at my teammate. He brandished his phone in my face and threatened to take a picture of me, while informing me that I had to have the permission of everyone in my shot before I snapped a picture of them. I was pretty confused and scared that this angry mob would attack me. In my head, it was just a picture of my teammate getting bread in a crowd of people. Everyone in my shot had their backs to my camera (except for the man who came up and gave me a piece of his mind, of course). My other teammate, Brittany, quickly ushered me away, and offered words of consolation (which I very much needed), and reassured me that the livid crowd was not going to hunt me down the aisles of this supermarket and kill me. I felt like I had received a reaction that was not fitting for the action committed. Having traveled in Asia, I snapped plenty of pictures of people in crowds and it was never a problem. People even wanted to be snapped. Back in the States, strangers would go out of their way to jump in front of my camera and photobomb a picture. As I was wandering around the market still trying to watch my back while processing what just happened, I remembered the African belief about taking pictures and stealing souls. So there I was, a convicted soul snatcher – a thief leaving behind an irritable restlessness in their souls, and destruction and chaos in the market. No wonder they were incensed. I was probably lucky to get away with just a lecture.
A soul is the essence of a person – the aroma they give off into the world. It’s what makes you who you are – the good, the bad, and the ugly. If someone were to steal that – well, you would cease to exist. And the thief would actually be a spiritual murderer. Before Jesus sends out his disciples for ministry, he tells them not to be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Probably the only thing Jesus ever tells his disciples to fear is the One who can destroy both body and soul. I would even go so far to say that the only reason people value their lives at all, is because they value the soul that is contained within them. If a loved one were to end up having irreversible brain damage and living on life support, most people would agree that pulling the plug would be the right and loving thing to do – that life has lost its purpose because life has lost its soul. As humans, we grieve when souls depart, and this holds true even in subtler cases than death. When aging people develop dementia or Alzheimer’s, people grieve long and hard for the lost and slowly disappearing pieces of the souls of their beloved contained in memories, dreams, and conversations. All religions will agree that souls are sacred, and the Abrahamic faiths would agree that souls are sacred because the Creator of Souls is sacred.
In Genesis, the creation of the soul is illustrated as God forms humans in His own everlasting image, and breathes into their nostrils the breath of life. Nothing else in creation is treated with such intimacy (try breathing into someone’s nostrils and telling me that’s not intimate), glory, and honor. That we could bear the weight of His glory – one that is eternal, perfect, and good – because He allowed us to, sounds almost too good to be true. And sure enough it was, since humans ended up choosing to live in rebellion and bear their own glory instead – one of sin and death. From that moment on, human souls began to yearn for the eternal, perfect, and good that they once embodied, struggling in broken, mortal images to seek truth and fulfillment, usually bringing suffering and destruction to one another in the process. But then something scandalous happened. The Shoemaker became the shoe.
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth…No one had ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” John 1:14,18
And it is through Christ, the living Word that we see and understand what it means to bear the weight of glory given to our souls. It is through Christ that we are able to, as we shed this failing image of ours and put on the eternal, perfect, and good once more. It is through Christ that we are at home in our souls forever. And it is because of Christ who created our souls, lost our souls, and stolen our souls back into His own, that I believe I can’t steal souls through my camera. In the end, there is a Thief far greater than I – One who steals to redeem and restore that angry, empty crowd I left behind me.
