The View from Inside

"The friends came out of the church and looked up, from the outside, at the window that they had admired while inside. They saw nothing other than the simple outline of a gloomy shadow. Nothing could be made out, not a single depiction of a saint, of an angel, or of the Savior, nor even less the complex plan and the meaning of the design. ‘All this,’ thought the sculptor, ‘is the most unsettling symbol of how different the appearance of a religious truth or a sacred story when it is seen from the warm interior of faith or from its cold and dark exterior. The Christian faith is a great cathedral, with windows divinely painted. Standing outside, you see none of the glory, nor do you get any hint of it. Standing inside, every ray of light reveals a harmony of ineffable splendor’." (From The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Consubstantiality Between the Mass Media and Bergoglio by Alessandro Gnocchi and Mario Palmaro)

 H/t to Rorate-Caeli