light made solid

Here is an interesting set of windows created from collected shards of stained glass from bombed churches in Europe right after WWII. Fred McDonald collected these shards in the forties which were built into The McDonald Memorial Peace Windows Project at the Main Post Chapel at the Presidio in San Francisco.

Army Chaplain Fred McDonald had just arrived in Normandy and reported to the 12th Army Group headed by Gen. Omar Bradley.

Periers had been flattened -- a sea of rubble spread out around a bombed out church. The place was deserted and silent except for the sound of a lone man trying to dig his house out from the debris.

McDonald walked up to the church, picked up some shards of stained glass, then headed back to camp.

He took some more glass and moved on, eventually collecting shards of glass from the rubble of two dozen churches and synagogues in France, Germany and Britain, shipping it all back home to his mother in Seattle.

Fifty-five years later, on an August evening in 1999, McDonald was having dinner at the Sequoias retirement home in San Francisco when one of his tablemates, art teacher Sue Tom, happened to say something about stained glass.

McDonald, now well into his 80s, looked up from his plate. "You know," he said with a smile, "I've got some stained glass I need to do something with."

His collection of shards, stuffed into envelopes and old shoeboxes, was upstairs under his bed in a room cluttered with books, war memorabilia, old menus and other irreplaceable stuff collected over a very long life.

"He wanted something beautiful to rise from all that destruction," Thomas said.

This spring, something beautiful is rising -- the McDonald Memorial Peace Windows Project. Stained-glass artists from Europe to Emeryville are completing a series of 26 windows using shards collected by the Rev. McDonald in 1944 and 1945. The windows tell the story of the time and place McDonald gathered up his treasured collection of broken glass.

Now the lead artist in the McDonald Peace Windows Project, LeRoux came up with the idea of 26 separate windows, each one with just a few shards from the individual sanctuaries where they had been found.

The original idea was to create one window with all the shards or perhaps a triptych, a three-sided altarpiece that could be placed inside a Christian church.

But before his death, McDonald signed off on the plan for individual windows, and for their use in an interfaith chapel.