Ever since the coronavirus pandemic forced private Masses throughout the archdiocese, many of you have joined in our Sunday Mass celebrations virtually as we live streamed our 9:30am Masses. In order to enhance our celebrations, we have taken the opportunity to highlight appropriate stained glass windows, leading to an increased interest in them. In fact, anyone who visits this church during the day is immediately impressed by its stained glass windows. The floor-to-ceiling windows allow the sun to light up the entire body of the church! But, they are also important teaching instruments, providing us with many scenes from both Sacred Scripture and the life of the Church through the ages. A study of the windows reveals God’s saving work from the moment of creation to the time of final judgment and depicts many saintly men and women who have cooperated with God in bringing his kingdom to its fulfillment. When the church was designed in the early 1960’s, Reverend William J. O’Donnell, the pastor, the associate pastors, Henry D. Dagit, the architect, and Mr. Bolton Morris, the designer and artist, collaborated to produce these beautiful works in stained glass. Not only do the windows assist in providing a devotional atmosphere in which the assembly can worship, but they are also sources of inspiration for prayer and contemplation. So, I would like to offer some explanation of each window over the next few weeks; enjoy!
As you enter the main body of the church from the Lancaster Avenue entrance, you see scenes from the Old Testament presented in the windows to your right and scenes from the life of Christ and the Church in the windows to your left. To fully appreciate the continuity of the story that the windows tell, let’s start with the first window, located on the right (west) side of the church.
First: God and Creation
In the first panel, God, represented by the all-seeing eye, contemplates the creation of the world. Wisdom is represented by two female figures, one asleep in the womb of eternity and the other playing before God. This imagery is found in the Book of Sirach 1:4: “Before anything was created there was wisdom; prudent understanding from eternity.” Throughout the Old Testament, Wisdom is usually personified as a woman.
The fountains in this panel refer to the Book of Proverbs 8:24 where Wisdom is said to exist when there were no fountains or springs of water. The scale in the middle of the first panel recalls Isaiah 40:12, where the prophet, describing the power of the Almighty asks: “Who has…held in a measure the dust of the earth, weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?”
The center panel’s theme is the creation of the universe by God and is represented by the creating hand. The works of the first five days of creation are indicated by the sun, moon and stars, vegetation and animal life, and the sea with the creatures in it (cf. Genesis 1: 6-25).
At the base of the third panel, the Spirit of God sweeps across the waters and God creates Adam from the clay of the earth. Notice that Adam is half brown and half flesh colored as he is transformed from clay into man. In the middle of this panel, you will find Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A half-eaten piece of the fruit (often depicted as an apple) lies at their feet. As they are expelled from the garden, an angel wields the fiery sword “to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gn 3:24). To the left of the sword is the depiction of Cain slaying Abel. As punishment for this crime God banned Cain from the land, and Cain later founded a city (represented by the houses at the upper left) where he could live in safety. The red cross emanating from the left of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the promise of redemption to come from the wood of Jesus’ cross which, according to ancient tradition, was made from the wood of that tree.
As you see, there is a great deal of symbolism in this first window; the same is true of all of the others; stay tuned for an explanation of the others, as space permits in the Parish Bulletin, over the next few weeks!