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Writer's picturePastor Liz

Life as Stained Glass

Updated: May 17

On Sunday, May 12, we used three art and prayer stations as guided mediations. Naming some simple pleasures, weaving our prayers together, and colorful reflection. I'm sharing a version of those stations for you to do at home.


The book The Glass Bead Game Das Glasperlenspiel by Hermann Hesse tells the story of a monastic order whose members occupied themselves in playing a game of glass beads. Instead of wasting their time in liturgical prayers and devotional rituals they knew that God prefer beauty to monotonous and senseless repetitions.


Rubem Alves shares the work of his friend and former student, Maria Antônia de Oliveira, who invites us to see our life as a stained glass window.

Life is portrayed in time 

forming a stained glass window, 

an always incomplete figure, 

of several colors,

shining when crossed by the sun.

Stones thrown at random, 

irreversible.

Shattered fragments

Give way to holes.

Shards get lost

Over there.

Sometimes I find

The shards of life

That were mine, 

That were alive.

Attentive, I examine them, trying to remember

what they used to be part of.

I have already found a little yellow shard 

that, pretending, rose again, 

an old friend.

I found another, a pointed and blue one, that brought on clouds 

a kiss from the past.

There was a red shard that made me cry abundantly, 

without my figuring out 

where it used to belong in me.


Use this stained glass coloring page as a meditation on the colors and shards of your life. 

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