Light in the Glass

​In our dining room window, there hangs a circular stained glass piece made by a dear friend of mine, Rev. Ellis Arnold. It's beautiful–and it holds a secret. Every single piece of glass in it is clear.

What appears purple in the photograph–and sometimes blue, sometimes green or pink with a kind of glow, sometimes nearly invisible–is actually trichroic glass. It catches and bends light so that color emerges depending on the angle, the time of day, the source of illumination. The color is never fixed. It changes.

Ellis is one of the creative people I'll be spending time with during my upcoming sabbatical. They've promised to teach me how to make simple stained glass, and I find myself drawn to that invitation for reasons that go far beyond learning a new skill. 

For me, there is something deeply spiritual about paying attention to light. About slowing down enough to notice the way beauty shifts depending on perspective, season, and illumination. Something that speaks in ways that words never quite can.

I wonder if that's true of people too. I think there are parts of us that remain hidden until something illuminates them: grief, joy, courage, tenderness, creativity, resilience. Sometimes it takes loss for those things to become visible. Sometimes it takes love. Sometimes rest. Sometimes another human being seeing us clearly enough that something inside us finally begins to glimmer again.

Maybe that's part of what spiritual life actually is after all:  becoming people who know how to receive light–and hold onto it when it comes. 

I believe each and every one of us carry light inside us. Every act of kindness received and passed on. Every moment of genuine awe. Every time we chose softness instead of cynicism. Every grief that deepened us instead of hardening us. Every experience of being loved when we felt unlovable. It all leaves something behind. Like light caught in glass.

In recent weeks–both during worship and in blogs–I’ve talked a bit about the wonderful and strange gift of sabbatical. For me, it means stepping away from the rhythms of ministry that have shaped my days for years–the meetings, the preparing, the showing up. It means sitting beside people like Ellis who spend their lives paying attention to light and texture and beauty, and being reminded that the world cannot be reduced to efficiency or explained in a bullet point.

But sabbatical doesn’t belong only to me. I think y’all are also being invited into something during these months. Not the same thing–you're not stepping away from your lives and your work. But maybe there is a quieter invitation here: to notice what has been buried beneath the noise. To let something in you catch the light again.

Many of us have spent a long time in survival mode. Tightened. Defended. Distracted. The light is still there–but it can become hard to see beneath all the layers of exhaustion and doing and performing.

Then something happens. A conversation. A piece of music. A quiet morning. A stained glass window catching the sun at just the right angle–and suddenly something inside us shines again for reasons we cannot fully explain. Not because the light was newly created. But because it was finally given a way to emerge.

The mystic and activist Howard Thurman once wrote that “there is something in every one of us that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in ourselves.” And I can’t help but think that the most genuine parts of us are often the places where light has entered deeply enough to remain. Not untouched places–transformed places.

I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what sabbatical will look like for you or for me. I’m fairly certain that sabbatical isn't magic. That rest won’t always feel restful. And that light–no matter how much any of us want it to–won’t always show up on our schedules. But I believe it shows up all the same. And I am trusting that when it does it will touch our souls so deeply that there is no way we will be the same.

The Celtic Christian tradition has always understood something that our efficiency-obsessed world keeps trying to make us forget: that the Light we seek is not far off. It is not something we have to earn or manufacture or perform our way into. It is already here–already in us. It is the same Light that sparked creation. It is the same Light that the darkness has never overcome. And it is the same Light that flickers in every act of tenderness and every moment of honest grief and every time someone chose to love when they could have walked away.

That is the Light I'm praying for us. Not a light that fixes everything or makes us shine on command–but the slow, quiet work of transformation. The kind that doesn't announce itself. The kind that just–changes us, when we are finally still enough to receive it.

Just like that trichroic glass.

On the journey with you,
Pr. Melissa

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