Blown away by religious stained glass windows
Johannes Schreiter
If there were one set of religious stained glass windows I’d love to have in a church near me, these would be it. In the 1990s, on a bus person’s holiday looking at church stained glass windows in Germany, we students clattered into various churches, pushing worshippers aside in our eagerness to put tripods up and take hundreds of photos of any old contemporary religious stained glass. A bit of an exaggeration, but you get the picture…
…This one was different. I walked into the chapel at Langen, Germany, and immediately that goose bump feeling came over me. Once the obligatory photos had been taken I stayed in the quiet empty church, letting the atmosphere created by the religious stained glass windows wash over me. It wasn’t just the quality of the light or the moving sense of community suggested by the imagery, it was the sense of calm and tentative hope emanating from the stained glass panels. It was breathtaking, and even now remembering it, the emotion of the experience is evoked.
It wasn’t until later on the trip when we met Schreiter that he told us he’d been using the geometric U shape – white in these stained glass panels – since 1962, and that they represented hands raised in prayer or supplication. He talks about the U shape carrying a heavy load of human guilt, which has to be exposed and confessed to both God and man before it can be opened to the light and expunged. The column of light top left indicates the optimism of such a message. Pretty heavy stuff, and I’m glad to have experienced it in ignorance first before learning more about these moving stain glass windows.
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