Reopening Our Eyes to Glory
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
The Southern ANGLICAN
Mar 04, 2026
There has been a subtle but unmistakable shift in our culture.
Once, our public spaces were warm — wood, color, texture, earth tones. Even secular architecture carried a sense of rootedness. Restaurants were vibrant. Homes were paneled in natural wood. Cars came in blues, greens, reds, and deep autumn shades. Christmas lights glowed in multi‑color joy.
Today, much of what surrounds us is monochrome: white, gray, black, steel, glass. Neutral surfaces. Muted tones. Controlled environments. Even sacred spaces sometimes feel hesitant to declare anything boldly.
This is not merely a design preference.
It reflects something deeper.
We are living in an age of metaphysical anemia.
Color itself is not the central issue. Wood paneling and fall tones were once common — browns, oranges, yellows. What has changed is not hue, but atmosphere. We have lost a sense of glory.
And when glory fades, surfaces flatten.
The Fading of Glory
Consider the common assumption about Greek and Roman statues. For centuries, we admired them as pure white marble — austere, rational, restrained. Yet archaeology has shown what we now know clearly: they were painted. Brightly. Vividly. Blues, reds, golds. They were alive with color.
The white statues we inherited are not original purity. They are the residue of time. The paint flaked away. The vibrancy faded.
And modernity canonized the faded version.
There is something symbolic in that.
We have grown accustomed to surfaces stripped of depth. We call it sophistication. We call it minimalism. But often it is simply the normalization of absence.
The world God created is not monochrome. The sky is not gray. Birds are not grayscale. Flowers do not bloom in black and white. The Tabernacle of the Old Covenant was not bare linen and concrete. It was scarlet, purple, blue, gold — richly woven, deliberately beautiful. The heavenly vision in Revelation is not described in neutral tones but in jewels and radiance.
Glory is not excessive decoration. Glory is weight. It is density of meaning.
When a culture loses its sense of transcendence, its architecture becomes cautious. When it loses confidence in objective beauty, it retreats to neutrality. Monochrome is safe. It proclaims nothing. It offends no one. It demands little.
But glory demands something.
The Root Problem: Hurry
Yet the greater danger may not be gray walls.
It is hurry.
We live in a culture engineered for distraction. Everything competes for attention. Very little deserves it.
“Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)
Stillness is now countercultural.
The modern world does not argue aggressively that God does not exist. It simply ensures we never sit quietly long enough to perceive Him.
And this spirit of hurry has entered the Church.
We hurry through the Mass.
We compress sacred time into manageable segments. We rush the Collects. We shorten silence. We move briskly from confession to absolution, from Gospel to sermon, from Communion to dismissal — as though eternity must keep pace with the clock.
But the Eucharist is not a meeting squeezed between errands.
It is participation in sacred time.
When we hurry the liturgy, we allow secular time — chronos — to govern what belongs to kairos.
Hurry flattens glory.
The Priest Must Believe
Renewal will not begin with committees or aesthetic campaigns.
It will begin with priests.
If a priest truly believes:
· That Christ is risen.
· That heaven is real.
· That angels attend the altar.
· That the Sacrifice is not metaphor but participation.
· That history bends toward resurrection.
How can he preach without wonder?
Tone reveals ontology.
A man who stands under glory cannot speak in grayscale. Even if his voice is calm, it carries weight. Even if his gestures are simple, they carry conviction.
If the priest does not believe deeply, no stained glass will save the sanctuary.
If he does believe deeply, even a wooden altar can feel luminous.
Slowness as Recovery
The first concrete step toward reopening our eyes to glory is not architectural.
It is temporal.
We must address the hurry.
Silence in the liturgy is not empty space. It is hospitality to transcendence.
After the Gospel, let the Word linger.
After confession, let repentance settle.
After Communion, let thanksgiving breathe.
At first, silence may feel uncomfortable. That is not failure. That is detox. We have trained ourselves to fear stillness because stillness exposes interior noise.
But silence is the natural climate of awe.
In Revelation there is silence in heaven.
If there is never silence in our worship, we subtly catechize our people to believe that awe is optional.
Slowness thickens the Mass. It does not lengthen it artificially; it deepens it.
When sacred time is experienced rather than rushed, something changes. Adults settle. Children notice. The atmosphere shifts.
Glory is not announced — it is perceived.
Individual Renewal
This recovery will not come primarily from institutions.
It will come from individual priests and parishes who refuse shallowness.
History shows the pattern clearly. Every great renewal began locally. A handful of men believed something profoundly, and the parish changed. Then the diocese changed. Then the Church changed.
The parish is a micro‑civilization.
If sacred time is guarded there, if silence is restored there, if preaching is done with conviction there, then glory begins to reappear there.
And where glory appears, beauty follows.
Art does not precede belief. It flows from it.
Rest, Not Resistance
When I sit in silence before the altar, the first thing that comes is not resistance.
It is rest.
That alone tells us something.
We are not made for velocity. We are made for communion.
The world keeps us from being still because stillness reveals what is real.
If we wish to recover glory, we must first recover attention.
If we wish to recover attention, we must recover stillness.
And if the priest recovers stillness, the parish will learn it.
Then — slowly, patiently — color will return. Not as trend. Not as nostalgia. But as expression of a people who once again believe that heaven touches earth.
Glory is not gone.
We have simply forgotten how to look.
And the first act of looking is to stop rushing.
Dr. Moore blogs at the Southern Anglican through Substack
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