Holy Trinity Rose Window

This six-foot rose window is set within the stone façade of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbus, Ohio — a luminous image of the Trinity visible from outside the building and alive with light within the worship space.

The design is organized through a trefoil-shaped swirl of radiating light, forming an image of the Three-in-One. Its structure draws on the church’s Gothic tracery, and on scriptural imagery that has stayed with me across many projects. James 1:17: “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.” Habakkuk 3:11: “Sun and moon stood in their places; they went away at the light of Your arrows, at the radiance of Your gleaming spear.” And Job 36:32: “He hurls arrows of light, taking sure and accurate aim.”

The phrase arrows of light is also the title of a Bruce Cockburn song — “Arrows of light, come / Pierce my soul / Pierce my soul / Breath of the bright wind / Make us one.” I have carried that image for years, and it found its way into this window.

When I presented the early abstract sketch to the congregation, something unexpected happened. They saw, in the swirling forms, a child in the womb. Embryonic and cosmic at the same time — the creation of the world and the beginning of a life, held within a single image. That reading was not mine. It came from them, and it became part of the window.

This window was funded as a memorial gift, and that origin is present in the glass — in the way light moves through it, and in what the congregation found there when they first looked.