Our Lady of the Angels — Scottsdale, Arizona

La Casa, as the Franciscan Renewal Center is known locally, is a place of worship and gathering. All are welcome. After years of overflowing crowds, La Casa built the new Our Lady of the Angels Conventual Church. I designed the nine stained glass windows in collaboration with the architects, clergy, liturgical art consultant, and church art committee. The windows are based in the Canticle of Creation by Saint Francis and the nativity at Greccio. The great Marian window, visible from Lincoln Drive, anchors the whole — Mary ascending as the woman clothed in the sun, surrounded by galaxies in a swirling field of color and light. At the other end of the sacramental axis, the Greccio reredos behind the altar images not the nativity itself but the approach to it — the universe bending toward a manger.

The windows are fabricated in mouth-blown antique glass from Lamberts Glass and fabricated at Derix Glasstudios in Germany, a five-generation studio with whom I have worked for nearly twenty years. Glass techniques — including silver stain, acid etching, sandblasting, and airbrushing with vitreous enamels — build up the surface layer by subtle layer until the light reads like watercolor from within the glass itself. There is no lead came. The mouth-blown glass is laminated to a carrier panel, sometimes two or three layers thick. Light moves through the work unbroken, shifting with the hours of the day, deepening over time.

Once the windows were installed and the sun entered the church through the colored light of the stained glass for the first time, the church felt like one continuous environment — the Canticle of Creation gathered within a single field of light and praise. Viewing the ascent of light from the two windows towering more than thirty feet high, and the reredos glass of Christ humbling himself lowly, I was reminded of the ladder image that is the theological heart of this place — which points to the source of beauty itself.

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