Wholly Diverse

Welcome to my new blog as the new multi-faith chaplain at the University of the Pacific! I hope you'll join me for conversations about all kinds of things related to faith and life.

I've been thinking about Rose Windows lately because I now work and pray in a building with a gorgeous rose window. I've seen some others - in the cathedral in Lausanne, Switzerland, at Notre Dame in Paris when it was mostly covered in scaffolding, and in some other wonderful places. Most rose windows, I guess, are in churches because stained glass was a tool for telling the Christian story. But like all stained glass, no two people see the same thing when they look into these windows. For some they are testaments of God's activity in creation. For others they are monuments to human creativity. They may draw us out of ourselves or more deeply into ourselves. The symbols in the window may be familiar and comforting or entirely new and exciting. These windows may be all of the above, and in tiny bits of glass, they pull together all the potential diversity into a single glorious prism. The differences are all still there - varieties of color and glass size and symbols - but all as part of the larger whole, a circle encompassing all, and that is entirely holy. I'm so glad that this is what greets me every morning.