Featured Window

Our Lady of Grace, Dearborn Heights, Michigan

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MSGC : Collections : Window

Window

Building Name: St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church

Artist Name: Maria Orr

City: Kentwood

Window Shape: 2 (rectangle)

Subject/Title of Window: The Prodigal Son

Brief Description of Subject: One of nine exits from the Shrine of the Penitent. “The Prodigal Son” is one of the parables that were told by Jesus. The younger of two sons demands his share of his inheritance while his father is still living, then leaves for a distant country where he wastes his inheritance “with riotous living” and is reduced to working as a swine herder. Repenting of his selfish ways, he returns home to seek forgiveness from his father, who welcomes him warmly and celebrates his son’s homecoming with a feast (Luke 15:11-32). The Prodigal Son, also known as the Lost Son, is one of the best known parables of Jesus. Jesus tells the story of a man who has two sons. The younger son demands his share of his inheritance while his father is still living, and goes off to a distant country where he “waste[s] his substance with riotous living” and eventually has to take work as a swine herder (clearly a low point, since swine are unclean in Judaism). There he comes to his senses and decides to return home and throw himself on his father’s mercy, thinking that even if his father disowns him, being one of his servants is still far better than feeding pigs. But when he returns home, his father greets him with open arms and hardly gives him a chance to express his repentance. He kills a fatted calf, puts a new robe on him, a ring on his finger, and sandals on his feet, to celebrate his son’s return. These windows were designed and painted by Michigan artist and longtime church member Maria Orr and were fabricated at the Pristine Glass Company in Grand Rapids, where she was employed. Pristine Glass employees Elizabeth Kolenda and her staff were much involved in the fabrication process by creating and cutting all the digital layouts for the window designs.

Inscriptions: The Prodigal Son

The MSGC is a constantly evolving database. Not all the data that has been collected by volunteers has been sorted and entered. Not every building has been completely documented.

All images in the Index are either born-digital photographs of windows or buildings or are scans of slides, prints, or other published sources. These images have been provided by volunteers and the quality of the material varies widely.

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