A Window Seat

At church last Sunday, my mind wandered. It was not the fault of the preacher, whose sermon, despite its low-wattage delivery, was simple and profound. It was rather the fault of the artist who had designed the stained-glass windows in the small chapel we occupied. These windows, each given in memory or honor of some long-dead parishioner, depict in rich color events from the life of Jesus. They are beautiful but relatively standard fare—besides the one detail that so captured me.

Several of the scenes—a miraculous healing, the Last Supper—take place indoors, in what appears to be a medieval house. In the very back of these rooms, almost unnoticed, are small windows. Far from static, monochrome panes, these windows are alive with the color of a stormy day—blue shot with gray and white, growing darker as your eyes ascend from the bottom pane to the top.

The windows are stunning for something beyond the color and the light. No landscape is visible through them, no figures, buildings, trees, hills—only that luminous sky. They simply hint at what must lie beyond the glass. Is this world of the gospels a land of dust, heat, and light, as we commonly conceive of 1st-century Palestine, with water-pots, camels, Roman legionnaires, Solomon’s Temple? Or is it the countryside outside 17th-century Amsterdam, with canals, windmills, oxcarts and an autumn storm coming on? We don’t know. Our thoughts are not limited to a scene laid out before us. We may dream of a world in which Christ walked among the landless and the broken (for the poor are always with us), blessing and healing them and confronting the religious establishment of the day, either in the courtyard of the temple or on the steps of the cathedral.

This window-maker was a great craftsman, without a doubt.