I recently sang at the last service of a 130 year-old congregation in Danville. The Conference is closing it, since the withering congregation is elderly, and can no longer afford the upkeep.

This church has the most beautiful and detailed stained glass, each color being its own rainbow of variations of that particular color, installed by a famous company out of High Point in 1930.

I once saw a video about stained glass; and although the method and material were different, I thought of the dipping of wicks into varied-color wax at a no-longer extant business, just out of Boone on US 321, called “Boone Candle Crafters.”

Recently, while going through old church items, some parishioners found a forgotten,locked room, containing numerous leftover pieces of unused stained glass from when the windows were installed.

Each church family was to receive a piece of the glass; and I asked the organist/choir director if I could also have an unclaimed one as a memento of this congregation’s sweetness to me on those Sundays when I sang a solo there.

In search of my memento/relic, I stopped by the choir director’s home later, but he wasn’t there. I stopped by the church; but although he wasn’t there, plenty of other people were. A church lady (not SNL) had a list , and was marking off items being donated to other congregations and picked up by those congregations’ members who happened to be “truck-blessed!” Those carting off the items to be used to God’s Glory elsewhere were in no way, vultures; but instead, like another class of winged “creatures”: angels! A very disturbing alternative lay in the church’s rear parking lot: a rectangular, railway-car sized dumpster (placed there by the authority of the far away, Church Conference).

One pick-up truck’s flatbed had a baptismal font with two, old-style, ornate wooden chairs, possibly occupied by minister or lay reader when they weren’t “occupied” at pulpit or lectern. I suddenly imagined a “church truck”(or “truck church”) traveling through town with minister and loudspeaker in back, and sextan, deacon, or elder at the wheel. It could also participate at food truck events, with signage:”Man does not live by bread (or pitas) alone!” And of course, despite it being the South, and despite his riding in the flatbed, the minister would, of course, be neither shirtless nor collar-less.

The next day, I found the choir director at home and procured the leftover piece of uninstalled stained glass from the former “Moseley Memorial United Methodist Church of Danville, Virginia.”

I held the 2×5 (inches,not feet) stained glass up to the sunlight and beheld deep garnet red with some black spots around the periphery. It would have been perfect for “painting” a just-post sunset scene, where dull red begins to mix with a deep-blue-becoming black. The late, Great Solar Eclipse of August 21st, 2017 would have appeared through it as a deep red, eclipsing, sunset sun. (It’s a good thing I didn’t have it back then, instead of my properly-formulated eclipse glasses; for if I did , I might be blind now).

That deep red, black-spotted color in the glass also reminded me of faintly-glowing nebulae, the dark areas being where no nearby star exists to make the gas glow.

There was a chipped edge, and when light-caught, the reflection was almost like bright liquid blood ( immediate thought: “Shed for Thee”).

I was impressed with my memento of that former church and its friendly congregation; but there was something about it, slightly cold, slightly disappointing, until I put my finger (actually, my brain) upon it: its lack of “personality,” having never been installed, never used in a church.

This piece of stained glass had remained “un-tempered” by that particular “two-way osmosis” of a traditional, old stained-glass church window, a “membrane” across which sunlight enters from without, and voluminous prayers, over time, exit from within.