Acts 7:55-60
Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14
Homily by Fr R Christopher Heying
Rowan LeCompte died this past February at the age of 88. Rowan was born March 17, 1925 but often spoke of a different day as being his “second birthday.”1
That special day was July 1, 1939, when Rowan was just fourteen. It was an unusually cool and crystal clear Saturday in summer. It was a day that captivated his attention and inspired a lifelong passion.
Having been torn between his interest in architecture and painting, that day was the key that unlocked the door to both, when Rowan was taken by an aunt to Washington, D.C., to see the august buildings of the nation’s capital, including an eventful stop at the National Cathedral.
The National Cathedral, begun three decades earlier, was still very much a work in progress. Walking up those steps and through the temporary west doors along scaffolding-lined walls, Rowan recalls that the organist was playing Handel and then he saw what seemed to be light “floating in the dark,” the rose window on the cathedral’s north end.
In a 2009 NPR interview, Rowan said that the cathedral that day was “a magic, marvelous, dim, ravishingly beautiful place, and I was stunned.” He said, “It was as if heaven opened.”
Returning home to Baltimore, Rowan began to read everything about stained glass that he could get his hands on. Then just two years after his visit to the National Cathedral, Rowan approached Philip Hubert Frohman, the cathedral’s architect, with a design for a small window in a side chapel.
Mr. Frohman gently explained that he would have to take it to the building committee for approval and, as he got up to go ask the committee, he asked, “By the way, Mr. LeCompte, how old are you?” “I’m 16, Mr. Frohman.” The architect was shocked: “Good God! I thought you were older.”
Despite the inexperience of his age, the building committee gave immediate and unanimous approval to the drawing. Rowan LeCompte was paid $100 for that first window.
Over the next 70 years, Rowan LeCompte would complete more windows at the National Cathedral than any other person, a total of some 45, including the 16 incomparable clerestory windows that span the upper reaches of the cathedral nave.
Rowan LeCompte also did the cathedral’s largest window, the 26-foot diameter rose window that is above the main entrance to the cathedral at the West. Based on the Genesis text, “Let there be light,” the window is entitled “Creation.”
When it was unveiled in 1976, Wolf Von Eckardt, the Washington Post architecture critic, declared that the 10,500-piece rose window was “surely one of the masterpieces of Christendom,” and he gushed that it was “a glorious hallelujah in colored light.”
Another writer noted that the colors change by the hour, imparting a sense of mystery and even of the divine (so Schudel in his obituary).
Today’s reading from First Peter alludes to various Old Testament passages which seem to speak to the glorious reality of being baptized into Christ Jesus and a consequent life transformed by the grace of the living God: like living stones, it is you and I who are now being built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God.
The church of God has never ultimately been about brick and mortar, however grand, even as truly magnificent as the National Cathedral.
The church is about being, both clergy and lay together, baptized into the death and the life of Jesus Christ that we may be together a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, and together proclaim through word and deed the mighty acts of God who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.
You and I, in resplendent and multifarious hues, shining with the light of God, imbued with those qualities Rowan LeCompte said he strove for in every window—clarity, richness, and sparkle.
Perhaps the greatest compliment LeCompte’s rose window received came not from art and architectural critics but from a little girl.
When the Creation window was unveiled in 1976, a young girl was seen that day dancing in the colored light that splashed onto the cathedral floor.
“What are you doing?” someone asked her.
“I’m dancing because I found the end of the rainbow.”
May the love of the living God poured into our hearts shine through us with such clarity, richness, and sparkle that others may come, come here to this holy place we call Emmanuel, come to dance in the healing light of God’s love, come to know for themselves the rich treasure of God’s promises eternally writ for all to see like a rainbow in the sky.