April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
VIEW OF FAITH
Parish gets stained glass 'triptych'
The windows, which the parish community christened "Invitation to Holiness," will eventually feature 30 saints and holy people with local ties, including early priests of the Diocese, Auriesville martyrs, St. Kateri Tekakwitha and founders of religious orders that have served in southern Rensselaer County.
Laity will also be represented: The center panel, installed in May in the church's 32-seat chapel, depicts a police officer, a firefighter, a paramedic, a soldier, a nurse and a farmer.
Rev. David LeFort, pastor of St. Mary's, was deeply involved in the artistic design of the window panels. He said the carefully selected holy men and women send a message that "every single one of us who [is] in this parish [is] being invited to holiness. It takes all kinds of forms."
Inclusion of figures like social activist Dorothy Day and St. Benedict Joseph Labre, a mentally ill homeless man who kept long prayer vigils in Roman churches in the 1700s, demonstrates that "you don't have to be ordained [or in] religious life" to work toward holiness, Father LeFort said. "Sometimes we might be tempted to say, 'Oh, that's not for me. I'm married.' Well, it is for you, precisely in your marriage."
A completed window panel also evokes the Holy Trinity using the hand of God, a pierced lamb atop the book of the seven seals and a dove hovering over an octagonal baptismal pool. The lower panel shows baptized figures gathered around an altar before the Blessed Sacrament. Honored are Pope Pius XI and Bishop Edmund Gibbons, leader of the Diocese of Albany at the time of St. Mary's establishment as a parish in 1952. Previously, St. Mary's had been a mission church of St. John the Evangelist parish in Rensselaer.
Father LeFort, a stained glass aficionado, has commissioned windows as gifts for priest friends in the past. He's been assigned to St. Mary's for six years and had often dreamed of installing windows in the chapel, a former classroom with a row of five windows overlooking a field. He started doodling ideas for the triptych in his spare time and consulted a friend and local historian, Rev. Hugh Vincent Dyer, OP.
A deceased parishioner's family approached the parish about donating money in 2012 and ultimately offered to finance the whole center window. A stained glass company took about nine months to realize the design.
In the meantime, Father LeFort described its elements in weekly bulletin updates, but the final product was hard for parishioners to visualize until they saw it.
"Once the window came in," Father LeFort said, "everybody was blown away: the detail, the vibrancy, the color. Each time you look at it, something different catches your eye.
"All throughout the day, the light changes," he continued. "I just love spending time in front of a window like this. I'm happy that we were able to do something that I hope is [going to] seem beautiful to the folks. It's so much more than what they had imagined."
The next phase of the project is projected to cost $17,000. Someday, the parish wants to publish an accompanying commemorative book. The windows, Father LeFort said, will be used as a catechesis tool and to "draw us into a deeper prayer for one another and all our needs, but [also] to inspire more to pray."[[In-content Ad]]
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