The writer, who covers music and fine arts for the Journal, notes:
“Because faces pieced together with leaded glass eyes and lips can border on
the grotesque, he (Tiffany) compromised, allowing faces, hands and exposed
limbs to be painted, but in a Tiffany way. The heads of these angels are each
distinctive, the delicate facial features and hair painted with such tender care
that they convey the appearance of softness and diffusion. Whether painting
on glass or essentially painting with glass, Tiffany and his associates endowed
these angelic figures with a compelling sense of inner light emphasizing their
divine nature.”
This exhibit was in the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica,
New York. True to the mission of In Company With Angels, the windows have
gotten around, from the Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn to art museums,
galleries and universities all over the United States.
There is an excellent website – www.incompanywithangels.org – which
includes the Story of the Windows, Meet the Angels, Spiritual Inspiration
(including information about Swedenborg, The Seven Churches of Revelation
and the Seven Stages of a Spiritual Journey), and an Angels video.
Like a treasure that was lost and is found, these wonderfully restored
windows continue to inspire with their beauty, with the story of the letters to
the seven churches, and with the revelation of what those messages mean to
our own lives right now.
(BMH)
thine is the power
“The Lord’s kingdom on earth consists of all those who are in good, who
though scattered over the whole earth, are still one, and as members constitute
one body.” (Arcana Coelestia 2853)
Back in the late 1980s, when I was still working as a journalist, I attended a
conference in the U.S. State Department on international defense and security
issues. After a full day of hearing from four-star generals and top government
officials the audience was mesmerized by a tiny woman who could hardly see
over the podium. Her voice was soft but compelling and attention was riveted
on every word.
She was Suzanne Massie, a Russian scholar at Harvard University, who
traveled to the Soviet Union every year and whose husband, Robert, was the
author of Nicholas and Alexandra. She worked closely with President Ronald
Reagan in understanding the Russian people and is credited with playing a key
role in the end of the Cold War.
She told this Washington audience that she was seeing a change in the
Soviet Union – before it actually crumbled in 1991 – rooted in people fed
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