Plumes of smoke billowed from the steep-pitched roof of a northern Illinois church one winter night after its organ caught fire during a practice session.
Everyone was evacuated from the property. No one was hurt in the Feb. 23 blaze at Christ United Methodist Church in Rockford, which firefighters quickly extinguished and determined to be accidental.
Yet the fire caused great damage to the sanctuary.
And to vent the thick smoke, firefighters had to break the window closest to the organ — a beloved stained glass rendering of the crucifixion of Christ, an image at the spiritual and emotional center of the faith.
The nearly 10-foot-tall image of Jesus suspended from the cross was shattered into hundreds of colored pieces, which scattered on the ground inside as well as outside the building.
“It was devastating,” recalled congregant Deb Laskey of Winnebago. “That was one of the first things we knew, that the window had been broken out.”
The fractured panes of glass couldn’t be mended or put back together.
But rather than dispose of the fragments, the congregation gave the remnants of the window a new purpose.
The night of the fire, a church volunteer gathered as many of the shards as he could.
“When I collected the glass, I felt a sense of urgency,” recalled Mark West, church trustee chair. “I had to get it picked up before it got thrown out.”
He took those broken pieces to a local glassblower, who refashioned them into more than a hundred small round pendants, to serve as keepsakes for members of the church.
Now each of these glass stones holds the memory of that depiction of the Passion of Christ.
Worshippers often wear the pieces of glass suspended on chains or chords around their necks at services, a collective symbol of resilience as they work to restore their church after the fire.
“It was part of Christ United Methodist and we all have a little piece of it with us,” said Laskey, who has her own blue pendant and gifted several others to her daughter and granddaughters.
The destruction of the stained glass window is reminiscent of the many ways that religious artwork and sacred items can be lost, marred or demolished amid catastrophe.
Fires, floods and other natural disasters have damaged many houses of worship in the Chicago area as well as across the country, jeopardizing the holy items they contain.
Frequent church closures also raise the predicament of how to salvage, preserve or recycle the sacred objects within.
And around the world, wars and religious persecution have destroyed prayer books, Bibles, Qurans, Torah scrolls, statues, iconography, shrines, relics and many other materials considered venerable.
Humanity has long grappled with the question of what to do with these vestiges of the holy.
Like the window in Rockford, sometimes sacred materials can be given new life or a transformed mission.
Amid widespread church closures and mergers, the Archdiocese of Chicago has strict protocols for the storage and reuse of sacred items after a building is deconsecrated, often transferring devotional items and artwork to other churches within the archdiocese to keep them in service.
Elsewhere in Chicago, themes of recreating and reviving spiritual artifacts and sacred materials permeate the work of a Jewish Iraqi American artist, whose grandparents fled Baghdad decades ago. His art, which has been displayed at museums around the world, often draws on his own family’s experience escaping antisemitism to evoke minority communities that have all but disappeared from their homelands.
And a local professor has spent years gathering used religious items for his collection titled “Secondhand Sacred,” which studies the circulation of vintage Christian materials acquired from flea markets, thrift stores, antique malls and estate sales, as well as online sites like eBay. The objects span denominations, offering insight into how their ownership, value and spiritual significance can shift over time.
Transformation
At the church in Rockford, dozens of congregants wore their glass pendants during a recent Sunday service, as they worshiped in a makeshift space while the main sanctuary continues to undergo restoration.
Sue Spitzer of Rockford had on her pendant made of green glass, which was smooth and glossy on top but laced with tiny white scratches on the bottom.
She frequently touches it, finding the texture on her fingertips to be a calming, almost meditative sensation.
“It went through something terrible,” she said. “And now it’s something beautiful.”
The stained glass had to first endure more destruction before its metamorphosis.
The roughly quarter-century-old window was made of particularly thick panes of glass, so the cullets had to first be smashed into smaller slivers, recalled Laura Johnson, shop owner and artist at Starved Rock Hot Glassblowing and Ceramics Studio in Ottawa, Illinois.
Then Johnson needed to experiment with different temperatures to melt the material.
The glass was slowly heated to 1,475 degrees and then gradually cooled, a painstaking process to make it fusible while preventing cracking.
“That’s one of the greatest properties of glass,” she said. “That it can be constantly recycled and remelted to make something new.”
The artist took care to return to the church any stained glass window pieces that couldn’t be used rather than disposing of them.
She also makes memorial keepsakes, fusing a sprinkle of cremated remains into glass or ceramic pendants for grieving loved ones.
Johnson, who is Catholic, likened the reverent nature of the stained glass window project to crafting these memorial pieces; if there are any extra ashes that go unused, she sends them back to the bereaved for proper disposition.
So often, the reuse of religious items and materials stems from sorrowful circumstances.
Locally, hundreds of Catholic parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago have closed over the last few decades.
Roughly 50 years ago, there were around 450 parishes across the Chicago area. That number dropped to 351 a decade ago.
Today, there are 216.
Before the building is sold or used for secular purposes, church officials take great care when removing the religious items inside, said Jacob Preciado, director of asset management for the archdiocese.
“We want to make sure the Catholic identity is not defaced in any way,” he said. “If there are other items we feel we can use at another church, that is our main focus and our priority.”
The process can be painstaking and take months, Preciado said.
“We don’t go in to remove the items immediately, because the community is still in mourning. So we have to respect that,” he said.
For many Catholics, life revolved around their local parish, he added. The neighborhood church often anchored the transition to a new country for generations of immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Italy, the Philippines, Germany, Ireland and other nations.
“That’s their grandparents and their parents and all the baptisms and weddings and funerals they attended in that church,” Preciado said. “That all comes flooding back … We understand the pain that communities are going through.”
Sacred materials that can’t immediately be relocated to other churches are kept in a secure storage facility on the West Side, which currently houses hundreds of religious pieces. Stained glass windows. Candlesticks. Altars. Tabernacles. Kneelers. Statues. Murals.
There’s a formal process for requesting items from shuttered parishes or those kept at the storage site, Preciado said. Priority is given to churches within the archdiocese, but his office does get inquiries from Catholic churches nationwide.
Relocation can be challenging at times. Some statues are over a century old. Various items are quite large, like altars that might need to be taken apart and put back together in a process akin to an intricate jigsaw puzzle.
One of the most dramatic local examples of reuse is St. Raphael the Archangel Catholic Church in northern Lake County, which opened in 2014 and includes recycled parts of multiple closed churches.
The entire gray Indiana limestone facade of the now-defunct St. John of God Church in the Back of the Yards neighborhood was meticulously salvaged, transported about 60 miles north and rebuilt as St. Raphael’s exterior.
Designed by architect Henry Schlacks and erected more than a century ago, the Renaissance-style structure includes a front balcony, bell towers, sweeping archways and 20 wooden doors, each 11 feet tall.
Much of the interior of St. Raphael — including marble altars, pews and Tyrolean stained glass imported from Austria — came from St. Peter Canisius Catholic Church in the Austin neighborhood, which closed about two decades ago.
Bells and other features incorporated at St. Raphael were also brought from several closed or merged parishes.
During homecoming and prom seasons, droves of local high school students — Catholic and non-Catholic alike — flock to take formal photos in front of the ornate exterior, said the Rev. Matthew Kowalski, the church’s pastor.
Parents often have their babies baptized at St. Raphael and couples frequently ask to be married there because of historical family ties to either St. John of God or St. Peter Canisius, he said.
A group of elderly former parishioners of St. John of God would occasionally travel to worship at St. Raphael, though it’s been a while since they’ve visited, Kowalski recalled.
They were “trying to keep the memory of their closed church alive,” the priest added.
‘A second life’
As the pastor watched smoke emanating from his church, he wondered how Christ United Methodist would continue to hold services, especially during the busy season of Lent.
The Rev. Caleb Hong was standing outside the building the night of the blaze, the fire trucks still on the scene, when he received a text.
It was the rabbi from Temple Beth-El, the synagogue down the street.
“She offered her condolences and right away asked, ‘do you need a place to worship?'” he recounted.
Christ United Methodist held services at Temple Beth-El through early April, celebrating Easter there before returning to modified spaces in their own building the following week.
In August, the synagogue and church held an outdoor worship service and picnic together on the grounds of Christ United Methodist Church.
The rabbi gave the sermon.
“We formed a bond with them that didn’t exist before,” Rabbi Binah Wing said in a phone interview with the Tribune.
While the fire was horrible, Hong said some blessings have emerged from the tragedy.
New ecumenical connections with a neighboring house of worship.
A sense of communal renewal through renovating the sanctuary.
Revitalizing the stained glass window in an alternate form.
“Don’t waste a crisis. Because there’s always something good that can come out of it,” he said after church on a recent Sunday. “If there is a fire, use it as fertilizer.”
But there are times when religious artwork and artifacts cannot be recovered, salvaged or repaired.
Much of Jewish Iraqi American conceptual artist Michael Rakowitz’s work focuses on re-creating or giving new life to religious materials that were stolen, damaged or destroyed amid war and persecution.
About two decades ago, the Northwestern University art professor began an ongoing project to reconstruct more than 8,000 items looted from the National Museum of Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion, as well as archaeological sites later decimated by the Islamic State group.
The series, titled “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist,” includes many ancient Sumerian and Assyrian votive statues with clasped hands, which were once placed in shrines to serve as proxies in constant prayer to the gods.
Rakowitz re-creates these antiquities using a papier-mâché made from Middle Eastern food packaging, labels and wrappers used by diaspora Iraqi communities. In this way, the replicas are imbued with the modern events tied to their materials.
“They’re made from the packaging of food that’s made at communal dinners and festivals of communities that continue to survive and still practice their rituals and still engage with joy, whether it’s food that’s cooked for weddings or Rosh Hashanah or iftar during Ramadan,” Rakowitz said. “It relates directly to the life that’s not only threatened along the archaeological sites and museums, but also the resilience and refusal to disappear.”
So far, he and his studio have crafted thousands of items, some housed at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago, as well as various other museums around the world.
For years, Rakowitz — whose maternal grandparents fled Baghdad in 1941 — had gathered pieces of centuries-old torahs, damaged Jewish prayer books and spiritual texts that hailed from Iraq.
In 2013, he turned that personal archive into a project called “The Geniza at Ostia.”
According to Jewish tradition, worn out sacred texts can’t be casually discarded; instead, they are stored in a geniza, a repository usually located within a synagogue or buried at a Jewish cemetery.
He interred his collection inside a clay amphora, which was buried at the Ostia Synagogue, an ancient archaeological site in Ostia Antica, Rome.
An Iraqi date palm — a Mesopotamian symbol of life and prosperity — was planted on top of it, so the roots of the growing plant could draw nutrients from the pages of those holy writings as they decay.
“The text has a second life as a kind of compost for this tree,” Rakowitz said.
Renewal through art
For months, the destroyed stained glass window — one of nine illustrating various scenes from the life of Christ at the church in Rockford — remained boarded up.
The sight saddened many congregants.
“We were missing something,” Laskey recalled. “Something had been taken from us.”
But in late September, a new stained glass window of Christ’s crucifixion was finally installed in the frame.
Many church members viewed it for the first time after the Sept. 27 service.
As rainbow-hued sunlight streamed through the translucent glass, some congregants marveled that they couldn’t really tell the difference between the replacement window and the original.
The sanctuary was still far from restored.
The carpeting remained torn. Bolts were coming up from the floorboards.
A wooden choir pew was badly singed on the side closest to where the fire started.
Kathy Wight of Rockford said the blackened portion was where she used to sit; all of their choir notebooks and hymnals kept underneath the pews had been reduced to ash, she added.
At first, Wight had hesitated to get a pendant.
“Because I didn’t want to be reminded of the fire,” she said.
But she ultimately decided to wear one, and soon found the necklace to be consoling.
All of the stained glass windows in the sanctuary, and the New Testament events they retell, are important to her.
Yet as she gazed at the newly replaced window for the first time, Wight explained why the crucifixion was particularly poignant in the life of Christ.
“It’s the most important, most moving thing in the Christian faith,” she said. “It’s renewal. It’s that hope. It’s … the hope in his resurrection. And now, the resurrection of our church, too.”
Some faiths have rules or procedures guiding the proper disposition of religious items and blessed objects that can no longer be used.
Often this involves methods of returning their elements to the earth, such as ritual burning, burial or pouring liquids like holy water into the soil.
Yet for many Christian denominations, there’s no such formal guidance, said James Bielo, associate professor of religious studies at Northwestern University.
The items then fall into a theological gray area of sorts, he said.
“So they are ambiguous. They are still recognized as sacred,” said Bielo, author of multiple books including “Anthropology of Religion: The Basics” and “Materializing the Bible: Scripture, Sensation, Place.” “But they are also recognized as kind of spent, used up. Unable to throw them away but still unable to be used.”
A massive number of church closures across Christian faiths, along with an aging Boomer population, has led to an excess of retired religious objects around the country, he said.
He’s found that the solution, in many cases, is retail donation.
“There’s that sentiment that I shouldn’t just throw this away,” he said. “Some people donate to a thrift store as a way to keep something in circulation, for example, as a way to keep a Bible in the world and available for reading. They would rather donate it and have its potential continue through the context of a thrift store.”
Since 2020, Bielo has scoured estate sales, flea markets, thrift stores, antique malls and online shops searching for pre-owned Christian religious items for his project “Secondhand Sacred,” which studies the circulation of these materials.
His collection includes many serious items that might be blessed or venerated. Statues of the Virgin Mary. Wall crucifixes. Icons of saints. Aging Bibles.
There are also more playful, pop-culture pieces.
A cassette of rapper M.C. Hammer’s 1990 Gospel-infused hit song “Pray.”
A View-Master — a vintage handheld stereoscopic toy — that shows scenes from the Holy Land.
“Because View-Masters are a type of virtual pilgrimage,” Bielo said.
There’s also a packet of grow capsules, small pill-shaped novelties that, when immersed in warm water, emerge as colored sponges comprising a Nativity scene.
“I want to say, as an anthropologist and as a religious studies scholar, they are sacred because they are part of this sacred network that is someone’s devotional life,” Bielo said.
Through this work, he’s encountered folks who are also searching for similar objects.
One was a woman from Chicago, “who really saw herself as a rescuer of these items,” and would give them away or just charge the cost of shipping; another was a woman he met at a thrift store, who mentioned she was purchasing religious materials to keep them out of the hands of “the occult.”
A separate collection of Bielo’s titled “Materializing the Bible,” a project on biblical tourism sites, is housed at the Newberry Library in the Gold Coast neighborhood.
An exhibit of “Secondhand Sacred” is on display this semester at the University of Georgia; last year, it was at the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
But these were short term.
Bielo longs to eventually find a permanent place for “Secondhand Sacred” at a museum or other educational institution, noting the divine yet simultaneously temporal nature of its components.
He knows he won’t be able to store and keep these items forever. The same societal challenge that spurred his research looms as an existential threat to the collection of devotional items he has accumulated.
“It’s a temporary kind of archive,” Bielo added. “I am able to protect and care for it, in a way. But a long-term home is what it needs.”
