The insight of Scott Parsons is right on. That the breath of God’s creation of man is a particular signal contained in blown glass is not only a precious gift of intelligibility but is also worthy of further reflection. His windows in the clerestory of the Church of Our Lady of Loreto recall also a related mystery: the ruah of God, “the wind, the breath, the spirit” of God sweeping over the waters in Genesis 1. The chaos below never escapes the formative Logos of God. “Through the Word all things were made that have been made.” Parsons has unfolded visibly the drama of the freedom of a loving Creator.

Thanks for sharing these associations. They have caught again the dramatic nature of truth. By their polarities the beauty of the blown stained glass windows in the Church is a plot thickener. Parsons’s windows become revelations of two freedoms – divine and created. Our grasp of these sacred narratives is first set in motion by the epiphany of their splendid drama – a free mix of ordered movement, color, light, earth, forms. All these realities are simultaneously sensible and intelligible. They become intelligible through movement from the exterior to the interior, from outer accidents to inner weightiness. Their beauty is discovered in the artistic elements where particularities convince the mind of their truth and their goodness gives rest to the will. As I indicated this dynamic polarity of truth and goodness is the stuff of beauty.

Once Parsons’s beauty elicits our wonder before the choirs of Dionysius’ angels, then our freedom is further engaged in the drama of God’s diffusive goodness. For God’s absence is made present in the goodness of the created hierarchies represented by the ascending prayer of the angelic choirs. Finally, we grasp the truth of the reality before us through our participation in the acts of adoration in communion with the angels. The culmination of the cognitive act happens when minds and hearts are introduced into and moved directly by the power of the Word into the liturgical events unfolding visibly before us.