Beauty and Brokenness
Often we find ourselves moving through our days oblivious to what’s around us. Tangled up in personal issues and concerns, our perspective narrows. The beauty of simple things goes unseen, lost amid life’s distractions. Then, unexpectedly, something catches our attention and we pause long enough to appreciate the beauty and wisdom hidden in the world.
A friend told me of a time when a small work of art did exactly that. A simple display of broken pieces of colored glass opened his eyes and heart. The radiance of colors emanating from jagged shards of glass moved him deeply.
His story reminded me that beauty can emerge even from ruins. In 1914, the gothic cathedral at Reims was severely damaged by bombing during World War I, and several stained glass windows were lost. Three years later, an American ambulance driver in the war gathered up pieces of broken glass from the ruins and later gave them to his friend, the interior designer Henry Davis Sleeper, who had them set into a panel in remembrance of the destruction of cultural landmarks in war. 1
1 Fozi, Shirin. “‘A Mere Patch of Color’: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Shattered Glass of Reims Cathedral.” In Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture, ed. Elma Brenner et al., 321–44. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013.
Fragments from the Reims Cathedral (Collage of 18th century stained glass,~ 12” x 20” )
Marc Chagall, Stained glass windows, Reims Cathedral, Reims, France.
Although pieces of the Cathedral’s historic stained-glass were salvaged and given new life shortly after the war, the cathedral building itself was not restored until 1937. Its stained-glass windows, however, took decades to replace. The most recent installation was in 2015 by the German artist Imi Knoebel. Perhaps the most notable of the new windows were the three windows designed by Marc Chagall.
It wasn’t until 1968 that Marc Chagall was commissioned to construct new windows for the chapel. Chagall said that he began with brokenness, scraps and shards of glass that were useless and without value, good only to be discarded. He arranged them in a pattern, bringing order out of chaos, and in the process brought beauty and light into focus in the minds of others. “There is something very simple about a stained-glass window: just material and light,” he said. The light makes all the difference. The windows were completed in 1974.
As my friend discovered when viewing a small display of broken colored glass and Chagall understood, in our own lives and the lives of others, here and around the world, there is brokenness. From that brokenness, however, wholeness, integrity, and joy can emerge. Light—hope—makes the difference. Like Chagall’s shards of glass, we find value within the context of a greater community, and we find wholeness when the light shines through us.
Peace . . .
