Church with no walls

I love stained glass. I love to take pictures of it, to look at it, to learn about the symbolism in it. I am attracted by its intense colors and artwork. I love stained glass.

I was browsing through blogs this evening, and stopped on Songbird's blog. She talks about touring a church that was damaged in Hurricane Katrina. She posted pictures. It is called St. Peter's by the Sea. You can imagine what it looks like with a name like that.

She has one image of the church that almost looks like the top half of the sanctuary is floating over the bottom half. That's not the way the church is actually built -- it looked like that soon after the hurricane hit. She also posts images of the church now, and how it was rebuilt.

You can see the images here.

As much as I love stained glass, I was intrigued by the image with the walls gone. Imagine a church with the walls gone, and the ocean in view. Beautiful.

Maybe, though, we are called to have churches with the walls gone and with view to the outside. I love stained glass, but we need to be able to see through it (figuratively) in order to see the world into which our God is calling us.