This year I was asked to be one of the photographers at the 2026 Steubenville Atlantic youth conference. There were over 700 young people in attendance.
I’m long enough in the photographic tooth to have had a darkroom for developing and printing photographs. In the darkroom environment I would expose the print paper to the original negative and then put the print through several timed chemical baths, wash and dry it, and voilà I had an image of my original subject that I could hold in my hands.
Observing the attendees at Steubenville it struck me that something similar was going on. They were exposed not to the original negative but to the original positive, Christ in the sacraments, and then rinsed, not in a series of chemical baths, but in a range of different pieties.
Let me explain; I observed a young person engaged in the exuberant piety of dancing at the foot of the stage to the music of a worship band. (King David who leapt and danced before the Ark of the Lord would have been right at home swaying to the band at the Steubenville conference.) Two hours later that same person was kneeling in the grass under a tree on the University Avenue boulevard, with traffic passing by on both sides, confessing to a Priest in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Later that evening they were prostrating themselves before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament in the Monstrance.
When you include the excellent talks, the camaraderie of other Christians plus the participation in the Masses there was a full range of different pieties to be immersed in.
Like the darkroom metaphor where the result of being dipped and dunked in the various solutions is the production of a physical image of the original, the plethora of pieties that were presented at Steubenville were capable of developing the image of Christ in the lives of the participants.
A photograph is only a “reasonable facsimile” of the original, but 2 Corinthians 3:18 states: “And all of us, with our unveiled faces like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory; this is the working of the Lord who is the Spirit.”
With the grace of God perfecting our human nature we can become more than just facsimiles. We can receive the gift of shining forth a glimpse of the real thing.
Although the Steubenville conference compressed the process of being dipped and dunked through a range of different pieties into a one weekend mini pilgrimage, those same pieties are available to all of us in our long-term spiritual journey. To begin our personal pilgrimage, we first must have the courage to move away from spending our lives just fishing in the shallows and heed Jesus’ command to Peter in Luke 5:4 to, “Put out into the deep water”.
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Adele's Photography
