the color of God

I spent last Saturday at a retreat with the GCL. We met in the parish church in Brugg and then walked over to see the stained-glass windows at Kloster Königsfelden, a 14th century monastery long ago closed and now a canton-owned museum and event venue. It's in a park-like area it shares with (1) a big and horror-movie-esque psychiatric hospital and a (2) museum about the Roman garrison whose excavated ruins can be found around the town. Quite the combination.

Windows in the apse (yes I just looked that word up).

This set shows scenes the early life of Jesus, from conception (bottom row) to baptism (top row).

A bit further back there's a window dedicated to the life of Mary. Along the bottom you can see the ancestors of the Old Testament - Noah drunk and naked (left), Jesse (middle), and Eve being formed from Adam (right).

In the first session of the day, the retreat leader invited us to think about the windows from the perspective of physics. Electromagnetic radiation, she said, is all around us, but it becomes visible when it passes through the glass of the windows and towards our eyes at a wavelength we can see. Similarly, God is invisible, and the craftspeople who made the stained-glass images of the stories of Jesus and the saints were making God visible to those present in the church. 

I spent my meditation time thinking about whether stained glass as God-made-visible was an apt analogy. What does it mean we point to these windows, completely fabricated by human hands, and says "there - that's God!" On the one hand, yes, these stories are our common heritage, the lenses through which we view our lives and world as Christians. On the other hand, are they not something of a distraction from the God who is in fact not invisible at all, but visible in nature and in every one of us? I wasn't the only one in the group who spent time pondering the enormous tree just outside.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. (Matthew 6:29)

Also, looking at the building from the outside, the windows are just dark - there's no light shining from the inside out...which seemed somehow like another unfortunate but apt metaphor for the Church.

For lunch we had a Teilete, which is like a potluck in that everyone brings something to share, but *not* like a potluck in that it seems to connote a lighter meal - you'd bring bread or cheese or fruit or a salad to a Teilete but never a lasagna. I brought a lentil salad. At least four other people also brought lentil salads. I felt well-integrated.

In the afternoon session, the leader talked about the content of the windows and pointed out cool details like the figures that hold up the "floor" in some of the medallions, and instances where the characters break pane boundaries for dramatic effect. The amount of detail is completely stunning.

Among the questions to ponder were "do I have a place in these pictures?" (I couldn't come up with one) and "is this a place where I can encounter God?" (not today, somehow). After I got my fill of windows, I walked back towards the parish church, sat on the wall of the Roman amphitheater next door, and watched the clouds gather into a storm while a drunk and/or mentally ill guy further down the wall yelled at the world.

The amphitheater. You have one of these in your backyard too, right?

The question for the closing circle was, "what color is God for you today?" Everybody but me had something to say about this - God is all the colors together, God is a rainbow, God is the green of new growth and photosynthesis, God is a creative fiery red...

I didn't feel like trying to share but I did know my answer: God was the stormy grey of the clouds, powerful and incomprehensible and no color at all.

God, made visible.