What are stained glass windows trying to tell us?

When I was in Berkeley, Calif., recently to celebrate my birthday with my wife and two of my three sisters (one couldn't be there, though she alleged she wanted to be), I attended worship at St. John's Presbyterian Church there.

And I was taken by the stained glass in the front of the sanctuary shown in the photo above.

As you can see, it's more abstract than some windows you can find in other houses of worship. I nonetheless liked it a lot. But it got me to thinking about photos of other stained glass art I've taken over the years and -- more than that -- about just what stained glass is.

So to provide at least part of an answer to that question, I turned to this history of stained glass from the Stained Glass Association of America. Among other things, that site told me this:

"Stained glass comes in three basic forms today: leaded, art, and faceted. The leaded is what we normally refer to as stained glass even though the term 'stained glass' means any colored glass. It is usually one-eighth inch thick and is held together by lead 'cames.' Designs and features may be painted on in solid lines and fired in, and the glass may be shaded by putting on a light coat of paint which does not change the color but cuts down the amount of light passing through to meet the eye. The paint is an oxide of lead – usually black, dark brown or dark red."

And as for the history of making stained glass art, the site offered this:

"Many histories of stained glass begin with Pliny’s tale of the accidental discovery of glass by Phoenician sailors. The legend recounts shipwrecked sailors who set their cooking pots on blocks of natron (soda) from their cargo then built a fire under it on the beach. In the morning, the fire’s heat had melted the sand and soda mixture. The resultant mass had cooled and hardened into glass. Today, though, it is thought that Pliny — though energetic in collecting material — was not very scientifically reliable. It is more likely that Egyptian or Mesopotamian potters accidentally discovered glass when firing their vessels. The earliest known manmade glass is in the form of Egyptian beads from between 2750 and 2625 BC. Artisans made these beads by winding a thin string of molten glass around a removable clay core. This glass is opaque and very precious."

All of which made me wonder whether my friend Hasna Sal, an artist who makes fabulous things with colored glass, considers her work to be stained glass. So I asked her, and she replied: 

"The collective term encompassing all I do in glassmaking is art glass. Within that, I do several different techniques of which one of them is stained glass. Churches have stained glass. Stained glass essentially means glass that is stained with different colors. Also, the (Kansas City International) airport installation I did is stained glass (pictured here). The Nativity Triptych (seen in this column that I wrote about Hasna's work) on the other hand has a myriad of different techniques I have used, but it is not stained glass. The techniques there include, Kilnformed glass, fritography, lampworking, etching, etc."

Several years ago, the then-pastor of my congregation, the Rev. Paul T. Rock, preached a sermon based on the many stained glass windows in our sanctuary, some of which are seen in this post.

Paul's point was that all of us are stained and broken but that through God's grace and the love of our families and neighbors we, too, can be turned into something beautiful, like the windows.

So enjoy the art you see here today, which comes from several places beyond my congregation, though the one at the bottom is a Tiffany window at the back of our sanctuary. It's a depiction of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

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THE PICTURE 80 YEARS AFTER LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ

This past Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and as part of that I attended a fascinating presentation by a staff member of the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, on the board of which I serve.

Dr. Shelly Cline, MCHE historian and director of education, gave a presentation about what Soviet troops found when they entered the Auschwitz killing camp in Poland 80 years ago. You can watch her presentation online here. It's well worth your time.

The question, of course, is whether humanity has made any moral or ethical progress in the last 80 years. Well, the evidence is quite mixed. On one hand you have progress on basic civil rights in the U.S., with much distance still to travel. At the same time we see parts of the world at war and millions of people suffering in poverty as others luxuriate in wealth they didn't earn by their own effort.

At any rate, here is an Associated Press story about the Auschwitz liberation anniversary in which you can read that "Leon Weintraub, a 99-year-old survivor from Lodz, Poland, decried the rising hatred (antisemitism) which he blames on 'increasingly vocal movements of the radical and anti-democratic right.'” So have we made progress? It's a hard case to make.