
At St. Rose’s on Cleveland’s East side there was a giant eye painted in the ceiling. I think that it has since been painted over. Unfortunate. Anyway, it was painted around a light fi

I was having a meeting with the Couple to Couple Ministry and thought it would be nice to have it in the rec. room in the basement of the rectory. It has a fireplace in it. “How nice it would be,” thought I, “since this is going to be a long meeting with these nice volunteers to have it in this more comfortable room with a fire in the fireplace.” So I went out and bought one of those yuppie-prepackaged logs so that, not only would we have a nice fire, nobody would have to attend it. “Carefree ambiance.” A few minutes before the couples arrived I lit the fire and went upstairs to answer the door.
Funny thing about basement fireplaces; the chimneys are awfully long. Apparently, as I was informed after the fact, you need a pretty good fire going in a fireplace like this one in order to create enough of a draw to cause the smoke to go up. The phrase, “Better late than never,” does not apply here. As we began to gather the weather took a turn for the colder. A nice, crisp breeze began howling down the chimney. At first there was just a light haze in the room caused by the reverse flow of air in the fireplace; the kind of haze that you use to experience at parties before smoking in public became unpopular. The couples were so very polite and made little mention of it though after a while it became difficult to see all the way across the room.
Window were opened but I think it caused a cross draft which added to the problem by creating a cipher sucking more smoke into the room. I was trying my best to keep up appearances and praying that God would reverse the airflow in the chimney and suck all the smoke out of the room. But that hope soon went up in smoke itself.
Finally someone politely said, “Do your eyes sting?” With that we moved the whole kit and caboodle upstairs into a slightly more cramped, but much healthier room. Of course the basement still needed to be dealt with. So the men went down and covered the log until if finally went out. (If we wanted the fire to stay lit it would not have fought for life this strongly.)
Our first window shows Saint Mary Magdalene at the foot of the Cross during the crucifixion as we can see the two thieves at either side of Jesus. She was a witness of both his death and of His resurrection. So to the left we see the skull, a remembrance of death, and to the right a phoenix, a symbol of the resurrection.
The reason the phoenix is a symbol of the resurrection is because ancient mythology said that the phoenix was a mystical bird that, when it grew old, would dive down into the flames of a fire, only to rise from it rejuvenated. Baptizing this mythology we can readily make the symbolic jump of Jesus’ death and rising to new life. As Mary was a witness to this we see her here watching the phoenix rising from the flames.
To the bottom left is the Gospel in which her life is recorded and to the right are the jars of oil with which she intended to anoint the body of Jesus.
Saint Monica was the mother of Saint Augustine, who was not such a saintly younger person. This should give even the most tried mother hope. She prayed ceaselessly for her wayward son. Here we see her lifting her prayers to Jesus represented by the letters IHS, a monogram for Jesus using the first three letters of His name in Greek: IHSUS. To the right we see the fruit of her prayers: a crosier which is a symbol of the office of bishop which her son, after his conversion, became and from this office became a saint.
Constant prayer even in the face of seemingly helpless odds takes much courage in strength. To the left of her we see from where her courage and strength came, the Eucharist and Holy Scripture.