Vitrail

 

Day trip to see our friends in Ossining. Before feasting together we went to Union Chapel of Pocantico Hills, an austere stone church built by the art-loving Rockefellers and filled, over the ensuing decades, with memorial stained glass windows, most by Marc Chagall. Photography inside isn't permitted, but their website has images of a few of the windows which capture some of the glowing depth of Chagall's colors. Here's Ezekiel receiving a scroll glowing like embers to eat. My picture above shows this same window from the outside.

The Light of the World!

While everyone's itching to get back into church together, it's a great comfort to know that our space is still over-flowing with works of love. Don't our windows sparkle especially brightly as 20,000 meals are shared each week?

Holy Apostles

Today the Vestry of the Church of the Holy Apostles had a lovely, rare experience - a "retreat" in our own church! This was made possible by a visitor whose "ministry" it is to reacquaint communities with the beauty of their spaces, and our space - quiet as almost never during its busy week - was more than happy to play along. Sharing what we knew and then, after 45 minutes wandering in silence through the space with sketch pads and meditations, what we discovered, we came to know the space we so love in new ways, and to a fuller appreciation of how others deepen and broaden than love. It was illuminating (ha!) to spend time with our stained glass in a church we'd just learned had been painted in "five shades of white" after a fire in 1990 (I imagine there was no white at all before that), and deeply moving to be reminded of all those members and friends across the decades and centuries who had known and loved this space before and, it felt, know and love it still.

Perdus!

Couldn't have known, when I defied the tourist crowds to visit this old friend in March 2016, that it would be the last time seeing its treasures.

Pentecost

Nice stained glass in a little chapel next to the Indiana Memorial Union

Out the window

Two scenes from New School windows. Above is one of the pieces of stained glass from a small concert hall in the most recent home of the Mannes School of Music, now overlooking 13th Street. Below is my office view of the Lang courtyard trees. In some years the leaves were flaming red by now, but this year they may go a different direction, most currently green with yellow edges - but a few have turned a deep red.

China calling

Went up for the day to Ossining, about an hour north of the city on the Hudson (it changed its original name when a prison was build there: Sing Sing), and another world! One remarkable place they introduced me to was Maryknoll, home of an order of Catholic missionaries. Their first mission went to China, and their ongoing commitments there - reflected in the very architecture of the place - make this like a Sino-Hogwarts.

The site is a monument to mid-century Catholic arts, with many striking stained glass windows, here are two, reflected (looking in different directions) in the holy water font at the entrance of a side chapel, the 12-year-old Jesus teaching in the synagogue ("in my father's house"), and a woman with Christ as he bears the cross to Golgotha.

 

Advent

First Sunday of Advent - and third day of the Christmas shopping season! Because the subway was wonky I got to see an uneasy coupling of God and mammon today, a church/marketplace. A favorite topic in my Religious Geography of New York class, the erstwhile Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion, shuttered as Chelsea lost interest in religion, had become a nightclub called the Limelight (later Avalon). Now it's a cramped boutique shopping center called the Limelight Marketplace.
The stained glass (at unexpected eye-level or below) looks on in bemused bewilderment.

Lost its mojo?

Went today to one of the jewels of religious architecture of New York, the gothic revival Episcopal Church of Saint Ann and the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn Heights. (Like many a neogothic church it has lost its spire over the years.) On a radiant November morning, the somewhat gaudy stained glass windows (apparently the "first set of figural stained glass windows ever made in North America" and considered the finest early 19th century stained glass in the United States) bathe each other in color, islands of blurred brilliance in an otherwise grandly somber setting. If only the life on the church floor were as lively! At their 11 o'clock - their only - Sunday service, there weren't more than a few dozen people, spread out shyly among the carved wooden pews. Mainline Protestantism in decline, I thought. And: Like Europe! I had to wince when the Priest-in-Charge (an interrim), in the midst of a sermon on leadership in and outside the church, mentioned the kinds of leadership books you could find on the tables at Barnes & Noble and added wryly that her "personal favorite" was Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back If You Lose It.

Fall colors

Beautiful autumnal day! I started in familiar territory, though unfamiliar on a weekend - to school for our Fall Open House for prospective students. Jefferson Market Public Library was looking as splendid as ever as one of its attendant trees starts to turn. And sitting on the stage of our auditorium, a futurist folly from 1930, I noticed it's garish orange actually makes from some lovely effects. Up then to Central Park, in gorgeous color. But I was there because a friend had told me that the hundreds of trees blown down by a freak storm in August were being turned into mountains of wood chips. It's true. And then, since I was in the neighborhood, up to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, passing the crazy statue in the peace garden next door, and then dazzled by the light of the stained glass bathing the newly cleaned white stone columns inside in opulent jewel colors.

Openings and closings

This is the weekend of one of the City's funnest events, Open House New York - all sorts of places ordinarily closed to the public are open for viewing. I didn't have time to do too much this time, but I did peek into the First Baptist Church at 79th and Broadway, home of the nearly aniconic stained glass above. (The whole place was once lit by glass of this kind - a kind of crystal cathedral for 1895 - but persistent leaks led them to cover the glass ceiling with Spanish tiles; now it's dark.) But the coolest view was an opening of another kind: St James' Church through the temporary opening of a building site. Between these two is Central Park, Manhattan's most beloved opening.

Elephants in rooms and out

A few scenes from the Denver trip: the mammoth costume from a production of "The Skin of Our Teeth" hanging from the ceiling in one of the backstage workshops we saw at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and models of stage sets from other past performances; some theologically sophisticated New Mexico retablos and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's Guernica-inspired "Trade Canoe for Don Quixote" (2004) at the Denver Art Museum; a pensive settler on the edge of a fountain at Broadway and Colfax; Elephant Butte and snowlike-seeds of some kind on the Boulder Creek trail and grasses at Red Rocks above Boulder; reflected skyscrapers in Denver's downtown; a pretty rose window at Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church and - to round things out below - a mural in the historic Brown Palace hotel, both across the street from our hotel.

Um, urgent?

In Cultures of the Religious Right today, we discussed a 2003 manual for pastors by Dan Kimball called The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. Kimball's church in Santa Cruz has reached out to young people curious about spirituality but indifferent to religion by using knowingly "retro" setups like acoustic instruments and an atmosphere more like a coffee shop than the TV show-like spectacles of megachurches like Rick Warren's Saddleback, let alone a traditional church.

Kimball claims that the generation of people in their teens and twenties now are different from any generation in the past, and that none of the forms of Christianity which worked for their predecessor generations will work for these. In particular, the strategies the likes of Warren used to reach "seekers" (people alienated by the churches they were forced to attend as children, but seeking a "purpose" for their lives) - deemphasizing religious symbols and rituals - don't work with this new generation, which thirsts for the real thing: crosses, candles, even (maybe) theology. Being "postmodern," however, they won't put up with dogmatic authority claims. The church must reach out to these people, or it's doomed to die.

Kimball's "emerging church" way to them is through "vintage Christianity," the re-presentation of traditional symbols but newly interpreted - and emphasizing the multiplicity of possible interpretations. It's like "vintage clothing," my student T insightfully pointed out, which might be used clothes or might be newly made but roughed up to look worn (indeed you'd kind of prefer it to be the latter, but not sure). Kimball provides pointers for generating spaces appealing to these "post-seeker" generations, and I decided to try to remake our classroom along those lines. I closed the shades, and put little candles all over. I moved the chairs out of rows and circles and made random-seeming clusters. I put on some Christian music. But the coup de grâce was on the screen where we project films and stuff from the internet. Kimball (p. 185) had contrasted

MODERN CHURCH (Seeker-Sensitive)
Stained glass taken out and replaced with video screens

EMERGING CHURCH (Post-Seeker-Sensitive)
Stained glass brought back in on video screens

so the washed-out image of one of the rose windows of Notre Dame in Paris (above), copied off the internet, grainy and clearly untrue to the colors of the original, shone a bluish light over the proceedings. It was pretty cool. But were lives changed? I don't think so. My students may be post-post-seeker, or rather, seeking a way to be over the whole post thing (which doesn't necessarily make the analyses of the emergent church less relevant). But there was a slightly different energy to the room...

Vitraux de New York

Here are two quite different stained glass effects from houses of worship I saw Sunday (still part of Open House New York). Above are the central three of seven huge Louis Comfort Tiffany windows at St. Michael's Church (Episcopal) on the Upper West Side. Tiffany's not really my thing, but the effect is unquestionably very impressive. What's most inspiring about Temple Emmanu-el, the world's largest synagogue (below), is that the whole building is lined with strips of reflective gold which reflect light gently but intensely (notice the middle of the photo). This gives the huge edifice a feeling at once of massiveness (the window bays are several meters deep - size of the spotlights at right should give you a sense of how big all this is; the restorer giving the tour likened it to Grand Central Terminal) and of something ethereal and mystical... I wish I'd been better able to capture the mysterious glow, more powerful by far than the windows you actually saw, "a still small voice" of light... (but remember to click on it, and the one above, for a sharper image)