Temptations Behind Stained Glass: A Canticle of Desires and Redemptions

Almost every temptation that every person has faced is faced by the monks within the stone walls of St. Invictus Abbey. Promises of health, wealth, and well-being to taste love, real romance, and happiness are broken by the invasions of the seven deadly sins and their malevolent henchmen; they plunder and pillage our lives. St. Invictus Abbey is being ravaged and it lays in various stages of ruin. The daily chants within the Abbey become the background noise muffling the Sirens' songs promising an eternal past and future immortality. Similarly, we use past sights, sounds, and future expectations to insulate, and then isolate ourselves. Our shared legacies of fear, dysfunction and tragedy war against the endless possibilities to live a life, as Shakespeare offered, that is "melodious, lucid, poised, and whole." We, along with the monks, wage our own wars and must decide which path must die in order for another path to live. Our guiding ideas that arise from our shared history haunt several monks residing at St. Invictus Abbey and include the equivalent horrors of the Inquisition, the slaughter of the Crusades and the ferocity of the Conquistadores. These monstrous evils and others threaten to rule the monks and us from their graves by illusory sceptres. The Abbey struggles to free itself from ancient and present murder, betrayal, treachery and the bondage of the past. The monks' engagements with death and life, illuminated by the smoky torches of their traditions and the brightness of Brother Sartorius, show us that love in its carnal and celestial forms moves us to live fully while we are alive.