The colours that complement our lives

There is something rather moving about entering a Church and spending time looking at the stained glass.  As I have stood so many times looking at stained glass windowsin churches, beholding their beauty, I am reminded of the beauty of the numerous other stained glass windows in churches around the world, windows I have never seen, and how they illuminate us with spectacular colours.  Many of these windows, taken individually or collectively, invite us to greater ideals of living our spiritual vocation.  They remind us how art can enhance our worship and open our minds to realities beyond our common perceptions.

Like many of us, whenever I gaze upon stained glass windows, their colours and designs affect me.  There is a strange interaction between myself and the window as the imagination of the artist awakens my own imagination, and I find myself drawn into the moment frozen in the window, reflecting and remembering.

If we take the multitude of hues away from the stained glass, rendering all the windows but a single colour, and you are left with a monochromatic experience, which, too, would be reflected in our lives, and so influence our reflections of ourselves and the world beyond.  If all our windows were devoid of colour they would convey no stories, and our lives would be a bit less, and our vision would cease to be as full.

Stained glass windows use colour and design to create a reality that might otherwise be overlooked.  Each small piece of glass within the picture plays a role in creating the larger image, and each piece stands in relationship to the other pieces around it.  What makes stained glass so attractive, beyond the variance of colours, is how the individual pieces of coloured glass work in relationship with the other pieces.  This is so much the case, that if a few pieces are missing from a stained glass window, our eyes catch it immediately and fall again and again upon that blank spot.

Yet, it is not uncommon to find stained glass windows with missing pieces.  After all, the churches possessing these treasures have generally seen many decades pass, and by element or accident, many of these delights of colour have had sufficient opportunity to lose pieces.  These imperfections, then, serve to remind us that neither divine nor human realities are ever fully possessed by any given moment or work of art and that Creation is not yet complete.

There are, in so many ways, parallels between a church communities and a stained glass window.  Like the multitude of diverse shapes and hues of coloured glass in a window, so, too, there are a diversity of individuals comprising a parish community, each person influencing the others, complimenting and contrasting, and shedding a different light upon the community in which they worship.  We, the individuals of a parish community, stand together in smaller groups, forming a reality beyond any one of us.  Like the pieces of stained glass, individuals and groups within a parish combine to create and aesthetic whole.

What’s more, as with missing or broken panes of glass in stained glass windows, each parish, each individual and group within a parish community, possesses its own imperfections, reflecting a space of expectancy, a place that leaves room for growth.  Turning your back on “imperfections” within a parish community can be dangerous, even self-defeating.  By avoiding individuals or groups within a parish community, by rating them substandard and unworthy, we turn our backs on the God-given idea that there is always room to create and grow.  Simultaneously, we are drawn into a synthetic sense of security, where the only reality that matters is the one upon which we choose to focus our attention.  Here we do well to remember that just as the stained glass window is a collection of individual pieces of coloured glass working in relation to other pieces and collections of pieces, so we are in relationship with every individual and group who make up our community.  Developing a respect for the entire community, regardless of what imperfections are found there, will assist us in fulfilling our call to be spiritually whole, to be Christ-like.  After all, Jesus was not known to seek the company of the elite, but rather those who most needed compassion and guidance.

It is easy to decide that our life is complete in the midst of its incompleteness.  We often become so entrenched within routine – the same group, the same acquaintances and friends, that we passively decide we don’t need anyone else.  Sometimes people go so far as to decide another person is not worthy of their presence.  When this happens we really do permanent damage to our community, and our stained glass window loses some of its colour.  The more we are unwilling to develop relationships with people different from ourselves, the more monochromatic we become in our world view, the less beauty and wonder we experience.

In our churches, and in our communities, we all do well to encourage one another to develop relationships across boundaries, to support one another in our individual journeys, and to see that together we form a beautiful picture that is far more intricate and beautiful than any individual piece of stained glass or any window we might behold.
Faith, Hope, and Light: The Art of the Stained Glass WindowDoorways, Windows & Transoms Stained Glass Pattern Book (Dover Pictorial Archives)