I’m a stained glass artist. When people ask what I do, I sometimes joke that I “play with broken glass.” It’s a flip-sounding line for a deeply intentional art form. The truth is, when I break a sheet of glass, I do so with immense care. My cutter, slick with special oil, scores a precise line. I use running pliers, grozers, or just the pressure of my hands to guide the break. It’s a controlled separation. Glass is supposed to be treated with care.

My first thought, when I heard the news from Minnesota, was a sickening image of chaos. A gunman firing through the stained glass windows of a Catholic school sanctuary. I pictured brilliant colors exploding, shards of ruby red and cobalt blue flying indiscriminately through the sacred space. I thought about the people inside, their view of the outside world already softened and obscured by the art, now suddenly unable to see the source of the attack. Then I thought about the shooter, firing round after round into the kaleidoscope of color and lead. Unable to see the faces of the students, faculty, and parents gathered for morning worship. And I have to ask the horrible question: Did that make it easier?

It gets you thinking about the very nature of our congregational homes. They were never meant to be fortresses. They were meant to be sanctuaries, open and welcoming. But here in America, that is a dangerous vulnerability. So we have the conversations. We harden our buildings. Our members take ALICE training to learn how to respond to an active shooter. My own congregation now locks the doors once the service begins, with a safety patrol standing watch in the hall. We’ve even discussed installing faux stained glass or frosted films on our clear windows as a deterrent—to keep a potential shooter from seeing the soft targets inside. And now… now we have the sad, horrible evidence that even the beauty of stained glass won’t stop a killer with a gun.

I grew up in the Salvation Army, a church steeped in military language. We didn’t call our churches churches; we called them citadels. And they felt like it. The one I attended as a kid was a brutalist concrete structure built into a hillside, inaccessible on one side. On the other, two concrete footbridges—our drawbridges over a mountain moat, I used to say. The sanctuary windows were long, narrow slits, each a single sheet of red, yellow, or blue. They were designed to block out the world, and they worked. So well, in fact, that one Sunday evening during prayer, we were all startled by the town’s tornado siren blaring. We hadn’t seen the sky turn green, hadn’t noticed the wind whipping the trees. The citadel had blinded us. We all made it to the basement, but after that, they always propped one window open.

That memory of being safe inside our fortress, yet completely oblivious to the real and present danger gathering just outside, reminds me of the stories in Pat LaMarche’s book, American Roulette. The book chronicles the victims of a single year of gun violence, highlighting the utter randomness of who lives and who dies. The tornado was a random, violent act of nature. Today, the storm we can’t see coming is an angry person with an assault rifle. Our beautiful, thick, color-drenched windows, meant to lift our eyes and hearts, now serve to blind us to the uniquely American storm gathering outside.

Our churches are supposed to be safe. We shouldn’t have to make them fortresses for that to be true. The broken glass in that Minnesota school sanctuary represents every life shattered in that moment. Even for those who weren’t hit by bullets, their sense of safety, their relationship with that sacred space, is forever broken. They will never look at stained glass and feel the same way again.

It’s sad to say, but I’ve become kind of numb toward most mass shootings these days. But not today. Today, I am feeling shocked and sad and frustrated and disillusioned and angry and powerless, all at once.

As a stained glass artist, my job isn’t just to break glass, but to put it back together with copper foil and molten lead, creating something beautiful and whole from the pieces. But there isn’t a solder strong enough to fix the gun violence that is shattering this country. There is no flux or foil that can mend a life. And that is a horrible, helpless feeling.

So I’ll do what I can. I’ll call my congressmen and my senators, again. I will join the protests. I will keep working to make the place where I worship safer. And I will keep trying to find the balance between the transcendent beauty of the glass and the grim reality of the citadel.