Angie Leventis LourgosChicago Tribune (TNS)
ROCKFORD, Ill. — Plumes of smoke billowed from the steep-pitched roof of a northern Illinois church one winter night after its organ caught fire during a practice session.
Everyone was evacuated from the property. No one was hurt in the Feb. 23 blaze at Christ United Methodist Church in Rockford, which firefighters quickly extinguished and determined to be accidental.
Yet the fire caused great damage to the sanctuary.
And to vent the thick smoke, firefighters had to break the window closest to the organ — a beloved stained-glass rendering of the crucifixion of Christ, an image at the spiritual and emotional center of the faith.
The nearly 10-foot-tall image of Jesus suspended from the cross was shattered into hundreds of colored pieces, which scattered on the ground inside as well as outside the building.
“It was devastating,” recalled congregant Deb Laskey of Winnebago. “That was one of the first things we knew, that the window had been broken out.”
The fractured panes of glass couldn’t be mended or put back together.
But rather than dispose of the fragments, the congregation gave the remnants of the window a new purpose.
The night of the fire, a church volunteer gathered as many of the shards as he could.
“When I collected the glass, I felt a sense of urgency,” recalled Mark West, church trustee chair. “I had to get it picked up before it got thrown out.”
He took those broken pieces to a local glassblower, who refashioned them into more than a hundred small round pendants, to serve as keepsakes for members of the church.
Now each of these glass stones holds the memory of that depiction of the Passion of Christ.
Worshippers often wear the pieces of glass suspended on chains or chords around their necks at services, a collective symbol of resilience as they work to restore their church after the fire.
“It was part of Christ United Methodist and we all have a little piece of it with us,” said Laskey, who has her own blue pendant and gifted several others to her daughter and granddaughters.
The destruction of the stained glass window is reminiscent of the many ways that religious artwork and sacred items can be lost, marred or demolished amid catastrophe.
Fires, floods and other natural disasters have damaged many houses of worship in the Chicago area as well as across the country, jeopardizing the holy items they contain.
Frequent church closures also raise the predicament of how to salvage, preserve or recycle the sacred objects within.
And around the world, wars and religious persecution have destroyed prayer books, Bibles, Qurans, Torah scrolls, statues, iconography, shrines, relics and many other materials considered venerable.
Humanity has long grappled with the question of what to do with these vestiges of the holy.
Like the window in Rockford, sometimes sacred materials can be given new life or a transformed mission.
Amid widespread church closures and mergers, the Archdiocese of Chicago has strict protocols for the storage and reuse of sacred items after a building is deconsecrated, often transferring devotional items and artwork to other churches within the archdiocese to keep them in service.
Elsewhere in Chicago, themes of recreating and reviving spiritual artifacts and sacred materials permeate the work of a Jewish Iraqi American artist, whose grandparents fled Baghdad decades ago. His art, which has been displayed at museums around the world, often draws on his own family’s experience escaping antisemitism to evoke minority communities that have all but disappeared from their homelands.
And a local professor has spent years gathering used religious items for his collection titled “Secondhand Sacred,” which studies the circulation of vintage Christian materials acquired from flea markets, thrift stores, antique malls and estate sales, as well as online sites like eBay. The objects span denominations, offering insight into how their ownership, value and spiritual significance can shift over time.
At the church in Rockford, dozens of congregants wore their glass pendants during a recent Sunday service, as they worshiped in a makeshift space while the main sanctuary continues to undergo restoration.
Sue Spitzer of Rockford had on her pendant made of green glass, which was smooth and glossy on top but laced with tiny white scratches on the bottom.
She frequently touches it, finding the texture on her fingertips to be a calming, almost meditative sensation.
“It went through something terrible,” she said. “And now it’s something beautiful.”
The stained glass had to first endure more destruction before its metamorphosis.
The roughly quarter-century-old window was made of particularly thick panes of glass, so the cullets had to first be smashed into smaller slivers, recalled Laura Johnson, shop owner and artist at Starved Rock Hot Glassblowing and Ceramics Studio in Ottawa, Illinois.
Then Johnson needed to experiment with different temperatures to melt the material.
The glass was slowly heated to 1,475 degrees and then gradually cooled, a painstaking process to make it fusible while preventing cracking.
“That’s one of the greatest properties of glass,” she said. “That it can be constantly recycled and remelted to make something new.”
The artist took care to return to the church any stained glass window pieces that couldn’t be used rather than disposing of them.
She also makes memorial keepsakes, fusing a sprinkle of cremated remains into glass or ceramic pendants for grieving loved ones.
Johnson, who is Catholic, likened the reverent nature of the stained glass window project to crafting these memorial pieces; if there are any extra ashes that go unused, she sends them back to the bereaved for proper disposition.
So often, the reuse of religious items and materials stems from sorrowful circumstances.
Locally, hundreds of Catholic parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago have closed over the last few decades.
Roughly 50 years ago, there were around 450 parishes across the Chicago area. That number dropped to 351 a decade ago.
Before the building is sold or used for secular purposes, church officials take great care when removing the religious items inside, said Jacob Preciado, director of asset management for the archdiocese.
“We want to make sure the Catholic identity is not defaced in any way,” he said. “If there are other items we feel we can use at another church, that is our main focus and our priority.”
The process can be painstaking and take months, Preciado said.
“We don’t go in to remove the items immediately, because the community is still in mourning. So we have to respect that,” he said.
For many Catholics, life revolved around their local parish, he added. The neighborhood church often anchored the transition to a new country for generations of immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Italy, the Philippines, Germany, Ireland and other nations.
“That’s their grandparents and their parents and all the baptisms and weddings and funerals they attended in that church,” Preciado said. “That all comes flooding back … We understand the pain that communities are going through.”
Sacred materials that can’t immediately be relocated to other churches are kept in a secure storage facility on the West Side, which currently houses hundreds of religious pieces. Stained glass windows. Candlesticks. Altars. Tabernacles. Kneelers. Statues. Murals.
There’s a formal process for requesting items from shuttered parishes or those kept at the storage site, Preciado said. Priority is given to churches within the archdiocese, but his office does get inquiries from Catholic churches nationwide.
Relocation can be challenging at times. Some statues are over a century old. Various items are quite large, like altars that might need to be taken apart and put back together in a process akin to an intricate jigsaw puzzle.
One of the most dramatic local examples of reuse is St. Raphael the