All Saints Writing

Sitting before the venite window, I recognize several attributes of its character that coincide with my experience in this new college era of my life. I went to a private school where minorities were very poorly represented. My church was the same way – very old, traditional, and white. I remembered the first time I saw a new African American family in the large sanctuary. I was surprised in a good way; it seemed our congregation had taken a baby step over a threshold. So naturally, coming to UT and experiencing all the different cultures here was a bit of a shock. This church window depicts people of many origins: an East Indian, a Japanese woman, an Eskimo, an American Indian, and others. It shows that God is present in all cultures and places; the very verse on the window says, “in his hands are all the corners of the Earth.” Today with all the bad things happening around the world like genocide in Darfur and military coups in the Philippines, it is all too easy to believe God overlooks these places. I find this window disengages that belief from the beholder. It makes humans think of themselves as all equal to each other.

The window also juxtaposes the old and new, which our class has discussed in the campus architecture. The window is not a traditional stained glass window, though its purpose is the same and unaffected by its nonconvention. The top of the window depicts kneeling angels bowed in prayer – the more traditional images. But underneath those angels are a mixture of people, time frames, and places. The presence of the UT tower is enough to justify the nontraditional nature of this window. So why is it here in an old church? It might be expected in a church house in a LeCorbusier’s floating box, but not here. I think it brings together the old and the new to symbolize that God has been omnipresent through all. God is just as important today in the engineering classrooms of UT as God was in the Middle Ages when Oxford was a theological establishment. A lot has changed since those times, but this vedite window says that God has not. God is constant. Our college is not traditional in the sense of Oxford or even one of the Ivies. No one thinks of UT and visualizes the cloisters of Oxford, Coventry, or Canterbury. But that doesn’t matter. The window’s depiction of the tower rather than some Gothic cathedral emphasizes the importance of God here today. This is not the God removed from the people of the Middle Ages. This is the modern God, the God we can all experience within ourselves.

Our college experience is all about relating to our campus – making memories and finding sacred spaces. “And sacred space…organizes sigh and sound, introduces light to present clarity and order, or makes things dark to suggest unseen presences and hidden power” (288). For me, the Tower does all of these – so then, in my own belief, does God not dwell there too? This I feel to be the main point of this window.