Sometime you can see God through a window.

The beauty of stained glass windows can take your breath away or break your heart. They're masterpieces in midair. They were the catechism of the Middle Ages, and, says Patrick McCormick, they make most current images flashing in our faces pale in comparison.

Late one blistering Tuesday afternoon this past July, I slipped into the cool oasis of the Chicago Art Institute, nearly as grateful for a brief respite from the summer's second heat wave as for a chance to catch a glimpse of the Institute's glorious Monet exhibit.

Lucky enough to get a last-minute ticket to the show, I soon found myself moving through the chapel-like stillness of the exhibit's 20-odd rooms with a small host of other art pilgrims, pausing to cluster before translucent images by this Impressionist maestro of light.

Bathing in the beauty of these paintings, we watched Monet's palette etch the hours and seasons on country haystacks, London's House of Parliament, and the snowy wedding-cake facade of Rouen's Gothic Cathedral and slowly awakened to the fact that it was light itself we were seeing.

The gift of Monet and the Impressionists was in opening our eyes to the way light paints, illuminates, and transforms the beauty of our world, and walking out of the exhibit it was hard not to feel the religious character of that insight. I found myself remembering the line from Gerard Manley Hopkins: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil."

Still the Impressionists were not the first artists to try to paint the light that illumines our world. They weren't even the first French artists to do so, and on the way home from the museum it struck me as particularly ironic that Monet should have chosen Rouen's Gothic Cathedral as a subject for his celebration of light.

Seven centuries before the Impressionists, the Abbot Suger of the Royal Abbe of St. Denis in Paris combined recent architectural developments and created the first Gothic church, a light, feathery creature whose pointed arches and flying buttresses reached to the heavens and whose gigantic windows illuminated their naves and congregations as no church before had done.

In the century that followed, Gothic cathedrals sprang up all over France, Germany, Belgium, and England, and suddenly the glaziers who had been decorating the narrow windows of the heavier Romanesque churches with the new art of "stained glass" were called upon to paint huge canvases of light decorating the great cathedrals of Europe.

Following Abbot Suger's advice, these churches were to be "pervaded by the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most radiant windows . . . [which were] to illumine men's minds so that they might travel through it to an apprehension of God's light." So at Chartres, Rouen, and Notre Dame de Paris, as well as Westminster, Cologne, Toledo, and in dozens of other cathedrals, the art of stained glass exploded, and suddenly the churches of Christendom were transformed into jewels of light made radiant by the grace of God.

For the next four centuries these windows not only decorated and illuminated the medieval cathedrals, parish churches and chapels of Europe, they also constituted one of the primary evangelical and catechetical tools of Christendom. Often referred to as the "poor man's Bible," these windows provided a largely unlettered Christianity with radiant icons and storybooks, illustrating tales from scripture and tradition and calling upon the faithful to meditate upon the mysteries of the faith.

Abbot Suger noted that "pictures in the windows are there for the purpose of showing simple people who cannot read the Holy Scripture what they must believe," and a contemporary catechism urged that persons entering a church "walk around and contemplate its windows." With a complex visual vocabulary that would have identified various saints, virtues, and articles of faith, stained glass windows offered pilgrims and parishioners Old Testament prophets and figures, gospel parables and lessons, Christian martyrs and virgins, and images of creation, redemption, and the end of time. One writer noted that in an age before the printing press, stained glass windows were the eye's visual literature, its movies, television, photo magazines, and billboards rolled into one.

Ironically enough, half a millennium after the printing press, we, too, find ourselves in an increasingly visual age. Books and newspapers are being supplanted by movies and television, and the layout of our surviving print media is being recast in the image of a television screen.

What were the image makers decorating 12th- and 13th-century Gothic cathedrals saying about the Christian vision of God humans, and the world we inhabit, and how does that view compare with the messages we are currently getting from films, commercials, billboards, and magazine covers?

While many church historians point to the educational value stained glass had for medieval Christendom, these windows were always much more than mere picture books of the faith or teaching aids for the creative homilist. They were and are - in a word - beautiful, and as anyone fortunate enough to have visited one of Europe's great cathedrals or chapels could tell you, for the past eight centuries these exquisite windows have been taking away the breath and breaking open the hearts of all but the most hardened and calloused of pilgrims.

The windows of Chartres, Notre Dame, Cologne, and York are the compositions of Mozart and Beethoven put to color, the frescoes of Raphael and Titian painted on air and the sculptures of Michelangelo and Bernini etched in light itself. Their awesome beauty has illustrated and transformed the interiors of these churches, scattering a mosaic of colors across their pillars, arches, and choirs, pews, penitents, and priests with a rainbow of lights, and raising a visual hymn to the glory of God's creation.

The notion that God's grace is mediated to us through creation is at the core of Catholicism. From the creation story in Genesis to Saint Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Sun, our sacramental faith affirms that the world around us is "full of the grandeur of God," and that God graces and blesses us through the stuff of that world.

As a result, Catholic theologians and councils have consistently rejected either attempts to find salvation apart from creation or beliefs that the world and matter were intrinsically evil. Our sacramental theology and practice has immersed us in the world; blessing us with water and oil, anointing us with chrism, feeding us with bread and wine, and marking us with ashes. Ours is a faith of signs, symbols, and sacraments; of holy water, candles, and bells; of genuflections, the sign of the cross, and the kiss of peace.

And translating the word, or theology, of that sacramental faith in the flesh of our lives has often been the unique and priestly role of the artist.

Catholic churches have never been just buildings or assembly halls where theologians and pastors explain the faith to us, nor mere waiting rooms where we offer our spiritual prayers to God. They have been works of art, designed and decorated with mosaics, icons, frescoes, sculptures, and stained glass. They have been filled with the perfume of incense and the haunting melodies of psalms, chants, hymns, and choral Masses.

Beauty, however, is a thing to be savored, tasted, and enjoyed. Different from the pretty or titillating images that are constantly flashing before us - pictures that simply distract, entertain, or amuse - beauty demands our full attention. For far more than a mere sensation, beauty's light is a warming sunrise bathing the closed, earthbound buds of our hearts and drawing them out of themselves, in wonder, awe, and transcendence. Such a thing as that can't be rushed, gobbled, or gulped down. Real beauty, whether it's the Grand Canyon at sunset, Mona Lisa's sly ironic smile, or the smoky sounds of a jazz sax, has to roll around on our tongue, reverberate in the chambers of our soul, and soak into the marrow of our bones. So we must sit quietly with the beautiful pay it homage with our stillness an attention, open our hearts to its rapture, and take its courage and compassion back into the routine of our daily lives.

Unfortunately so many of our images ages today fall far short of the beautiful. On television and in magazine we are constantly surfing through barrage of sleek or shocking pictures that momentarily entertain by offering tantalizing glimpses of sex or violence. With no time to actually soak in or be appreciated, these images are usually geared to trigger some "fight or shop" instinct in us. See enemy hunt enemy. See burger - buy burger. And no image is held before us long enough to really see it, to wonder what is going on, or to ask if this is actually beautiful.

If we lose our sense of beauty, if we can no longer feel the transcendent demands of beauty that we reach out of ourselves and honor God's creation, why wouldn't we simply consume more and more, while savoring less and less? Maybe there's a connection between the fast and the ugly.

Continuing an ancient Catholic tradition reaching back to the mosaics and icons of the churches of Rome and Constantinople, the stained glass windows of medieval Christendom are filled with sacred images of God, Christ, and the saints. This tradition reflects our Catholic faith that humans are "made in the image and likeness of God" and that we can recognize God and Christ best in the face of the neighbor and stranger. Indeed, this is a key theme in scripture and the stories of saints, with the virtuous person constantly discovering Christ in the face of the suffering poor. At the same time, these windows also reflect our belief, as expressed by Saint John Damascene and the Second Council of Nicea (787), that in making such images we are not worshiping matter but praising the God who created us and took on our flesh. Such images, which explore and express the breadth of our unfolding grasp of God's presence, might well be described as our theology of Creation and the Incarnation put to color.

Catholic saints are persons in whose lives the grace of God shines with a special brilliance, so perhaps it's particularly fitting that their images should be in the stained glass windows illuminating the interiors of churches. Like the windows in which they are pictured, these saints are beacons of God's light shining on the faithful, offering both exemplary stars to guide the way as well as a showering cascade of graces, prayers, and intercessions. And as we can infer from Saint Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, there are a variety of saints and windows in the church because there are a variety of ways of being Christlike.

Just as daylight is refracted differently through each stained glass window, creating its own unique masterpiece of color and tone, so the virtues and deeds of each saint illustrates another way in which God's grace can transform a life, one more way of being fully human and Christlike. Whether it is Elizabeth Ann Seton, Martin de Porres, or Teresa of Avila, each saint's image reminds us of both the infinite riches of God's grace and our own personal vocation to sanctity.

Unfortunately the religious imagination of Western Christianity has long been hobbled by strains of patriarchy, racism, and clericalism, so that any review of religious art or the liturgical calendar shows a disproportionate attention given to white male celibates. Images (and language) of God have grossly overstressed the masculine and European points of view, while - in spite of the strong Marian emphasis - women, indigenous peoples of the other continents and noncelibate Catholics are seriously underrepresented in the canon of saints celebrated in our sacramentary and stained glass.

As the church is recognizing, there is a need for expansion of our religious imagination. The images offered us in medieval stained glass need to be augmented by a rich iconography of saints in a greater variety of vocational, geographical, and historical settings.

The cathedrals of the "catholic" church must be lit by the images and art of all believers. Still the images in stained lass windows (and the sacramental faith they express) do remind us to seek the face of God in our neighbor, and in so doing, call us to care for the suffering flesh of the poor, sick, and hungry with the same reverence we would show Christ.

How does that attitude compare with our own visual age's adoration of perfect bodies? Aren't all these advertisements, billboards, and infomercials worshiping thin thighs, flat abs, and thick hair telling us that our bodies are not sacred unless they are made over in the image and likeness of Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts? And if our bodies have to be perfect before we can discern the hand of God's creation in them, how likely is it that we will see Christ in the flesh of the sick, poor, and suffering?

Stained glass windows hold up for our admiration men and women whose overriding characteristic is that they have opened themselves to God's love, they have been transformed by the grace of God, and they have sought to live their lives with compassion, integrity, and faith. Icons of King Wenceslaus, Rose of Lima, and Vincent de Paul are offered as an ideal of what it can mean to be fully human, to be Christlike. Meanwhile, the heroic images offered on the covers of our video rentals give a very different message. Modern icons like Schwarzenegger the Vengeful, Stallone the Terrible, and Segal the Sadistic hold up emotional and physical violence as images of good humanity.

Within Europe's great cathedrals - indeed, within most parish churches - the figures in the stained glass windows form something of a heavenly chorus, a constellation of lights serving as Christianity's family photo album. Praying in the graceful "shadow" of these windows, it is hard to forget that we are never alone, that a host of others gather around the Eucharist table with us, remember us in their prayers, and guide us with their inspiration. In such places we are constantly reminded of our own connection to the larger tapestry of the Catholic community and to the blessings and duties that implies.

That sense of community makes a striking contrast with one of the central images of our own culture, that of the loner. At the movies and on television it is so often the rugged individual who is held up as a model of good humanity, not the ones who "work and play well with others."

With such a disconnected view of reality, is it any wonder that our culture does such a bad job of taking care of its children or that our young are at war with our elderly over government health-care benefits? How would we be different if we pictured ourselves as part of a larger community of persons, of saints?

When I was a child, my father used to paint a nativity scene on our living-room window every Christmas, and my siblings and I would sit up late watching him color in the cartoons of his "stained glass" figures: Mary in blue and white, Joseph in brown, and the Christ child with a golden halo.

Once the local pastor asked him to paint this scene in the rectory window, and I remember stopping in the dark to watch the progress of his art. I knew then that he felt a particular pride in being asked by the parish priest to do this work, but I wonder what he would have said had he known that in the eighth century the theologian Theodore the Studite had said that such image making was itself a priestly art, that to be an image maker is to be a member of the royal priesthood of the People of God? Images are a key part and expression of our Catholic faith, and this month as we celebrate the Word made flesh, it might be good to reflect on our own vocations to be living icons of the Christ. What images are we celebrating and passing on?