Stained Glass

The large bay windows in the small living room of my childhood home were the pride of my parents. They had replaced the fogged, multi-paned old windows a few years after we moved in, installing large sheets of sparkling glass that framed perfectly the purple and dusky tones of the Rocky Mountains at sunset. They kept the rosy stained glass above the windows, saying it gave the old house its character. Every brilliant evening, I would trace the patterns the mottled pink glass shone onto the dark wood flooring instead of admiring Long’s Peak, a fourteen thousand-foot peak whose name I had not yet learned, as its dark point pierced the sun and cast a shadow over the plain.

I thought that the Holy Spirit lived in stained glass windows. Why else would so many churches need to have them? I decided the window makers must know how to capture him in the colors, sealing him down with lead and pinning him up against the wall. He was always there in the church then, but you could only see him when the sun came out and he shone himself into the pews. Whenever I pictured the dove descending on Jesus after he was baptized, I thought of the pink shapes travelling across my living room floor as the light sank behind the mountains.

At age seven I desired more than anything else to “let Jesus into my heart,” as my Sunday school teacher had asked us all so many times to do. If I let him in, he would get me into heaven where it was always light and the streets were yellow though there were no buildings, just green fields and talking lions and lambs. If I asked him, he would come live inside the beating thing inside my chest that I could feel in my wrist and neck, and then when I died, I would be able to fly with wings like the angel on top of the Christmas tree.

I knew God would be waiting for me in the windows. My parents had collapsed into their Sunday afternoon nap when I stood in the widest puddle of pink light and stared directly into the disk of the sun as it hung suspended, rippled and distorted in the glass.

But the light stayed on my skin. I could see it on the palms of my hands, and I could see my shadow behind me where I blocked out the glory, where it couldn’t penetrate. Perhaps I was too solid, too “bone-headed,” as my grandmother said, for God to get through. Maybe he had hardened me, like He had hardened Pharaoh, the man with the tall gold hat on the felt board who wanted the Israelites to keep making bricks.

I had enough sense to know that I could not actually cut open my chest to let him in. But I had to show him I was serious, that I wasn’t stubborn beyond his help, that I wasn’t hardened. He needed to know I wanted him.

I curled both my hands over my chest and then flung my arms away from myself, flinging away my stubbornness, my solidness, which had to be the thing the people at church called sin. If I couldn’t actually open my chest, I could show God that I wanted to by pretending, because pretending could be as serious as reality. Church had also taught me that God saw my thoughts. So I flung my arms wide and pictured in my head the folding back of skin, the cracking of ribs, and the splitting of the red mass depicted on science posters in my mother’s classroom. Each time I opened myself to him, I waited for the dove of pink and white light to fly down from the window and settle on my bleeding heart.

“Julie, what are you doing?” Mom had seen my third attempt at heaven from the top of the stairs.

“Nothing.” I ran into the kitchen tried to act like a normal child, like one that had not been impenetrable to God.