37: Glass man

 I don’t think I’ve ever really given enough credit to glass. 

In my stereotypically masculine mind, I’ve tended to equate it with cracks and shatter and being unable to walk barefoot in the kitchen after a cup met an untimely elbow or wayward ladle. It’s always been equated to something to be wrapped up in old newspapers and great-grandmothers quilt when you’re loading up the U-Haul. It is put up on the top shelf outside of the wingspan of anyone younger than 9 and, if used in fluorescents, to be shielded behind a perpetually grimy plastic coffin latched to the ceiling of an office that no one wanted to come into today anyways.

 

I’ve spent my life praising the resilience of steel, stone and heavy oak timbers. Things to build upon and to hang one’s life on. “A house made of glass…” being juxtaposed inadvertently with the comparative infragility of a well-lofted rock. Mr. Glass, cracked spectacles, an opera soprano blasting the wine glass with her lungs; each of these images has reverberated the anti-virtue of glass into my head and subconscious heart. For 30 years, I have actively snubbed the thought of pursuing a life that had any resemblance to glass.

 

Recently, that has changed.

 

I saw a man that I had once perceived as iron turn out to be glass. And it was beautiful.

 

Because it showed me that there is more to glass than just breakage and shattering, it showed me that there is a strength in its sheer translucency that something like steel will never be able to even wrap its figurative mind around.

 

Light makes all the difference.

 

Instead of seeing my Aunt’s flower vase scattered over the parlor tiles, I began to see the thick panes enclosing a lighthouse. A shelter for what was historically fire as it radiated out bright warmth, hope and safety right back out through that which was being brutalized by wind and wafted waves and the dreaded nor’easter. A steel slat would undoubtably have kept the fire from the elements, but at the cost of countless lives.

 

Instead of seeing my cracked phone screen, I began to see the window into a home. The soft warmth of a newborn morning sun looking out over a million miles of creation and being able to meet my eyes through this dusty, flat slat of melted sand that will (if forecasts stay as they are) keep the coming hurricane from entering the safety of my home.

 

I see a lantern. And I see that sad-warmth of a lone candle inside it. And it lights the way for anyone who holds it so much more effectively than a barbecue grill would (for a lot of reasons, portability being an easy target).

 

It would be easy to pretend that I can live my life like stone, steel or oak. But the reality is that my fragility is inherent to my simply being alive. A wise man is teaching me that it may just be best to embrace being glass so that the light of Christ that is in me can shine through me.

Thanks, Dad.