c. 2006 Religion News Service

METAIRIE, La. _ The Attenhofer Stained Glass Restoration and Design Studio, housed in an unremarkable brick storefront, would seem an unlikely place for the spheres of heaven and earth to intersect.

Yet in the post-Katrina cosmos, that appears to be the situation.

Hurricane Katrina devastated sacred as well as secular structures. Some of the stained-glass windows of local churches _ sparkling images that have inspired the devout for generations _ were torn from their casements or smashed by flying debris, reduced to shards of colored glass and tangles of spidery lead framework.

Inside the studio, the rescued remnants of many such windows lay like patients in an intensive care unit on workbenches. Hovering over them were master stained-glass repairer Cindy Courage-Knezeak and her assistant, Jackie Borrouso, laboring intently to restore all the storm had put asunder.

Metaphysically speaking, they weren’t alone in their work.

The disembodied faces of St. Theresa of Avila, St. Margaret Mary and Jesus lay nearby, glowing from within, due to the ethereal radiance of a workshop light table.

A glass image of Christ’s bleeding heart shared shop space with a blue bottle of Gatorade, a pack of stale Marlboros and a dry plastic fish bowl. At Attenhofer, the spiritual and corporeal had blurred to a point of indistinctness.

Courage-Knezeak, 48 with shoulder-length blond hair that she tossed from her face as she stooped to her work, admitted to being occasionally discouraged by the post-Katrina bounty of stained-glass repair jobs. A call from a member of a stricken church earlier that morning had sent her into a momentary manic tailspin.

“I was overwhelmed. It’s too much. I can’t take it anymore,” she yelped, comically reliving the trauma.

With a well-worn clipper, Courage-Knezeak spliced together lengths of lead rail as she reassembled one of the sacred jigsaw puzzles of colored glass. Most of the fragments were decades-old antiques, but some were newly painted impostors that, Courage-Knezeak proudly pointed out, were practically indistinguishable from the originals.

Much of the work is far from refined: spot soldering, pounding horseshoe nails into a wooden table top to hold the glass segments together, toting heavy boxes of lead rail, placing long-distance phone pleas for “glass that’s no longer produced,” climbing treacherous scaffolding and trekking into flood-ravaged neighborhoods to retrieve damaged stained glass.

It’s not at all what Courage-Knezeak might have expected while growing up in Potomac, Md., where her father was a high-powered public relations executive and Washington insider.

A natural artist, she dabbled with stained glass in high school. But after her parents admonished her that there’s no money in art, she studied marketing in college. She soon married and began a family.

In 1986, when her husband’s job brought them to New Orleans, her time was mostly spent raising two sons. She squeezed in stained-glass classes at Attenhofer when she could.

When the couple divorced 15 years ago, Courage-Knezeak stayed in New Orleans and was hired as an assistant at the Attenhofer studio. Suddenly, her hobby became a means of support for her sons. “I got up to speed fast,” she said.

After a few years learning the trade, Courage-Knezeak began managing the business. When owner Ken Attenhofer was ready to retire, she bought him out.

Life became a pleasant blur of colorful glass sun catchers, complex pool-table lamps and occasional church commissions, all completed with the help of a handful of part-time employees. As a licensed stained-glass contractor, Courage-Knezeak was soon regionally renowned for her meticulous restoration work.

Then came Katrina.

Courage-Knezeak fled the oncoming storm with her boyfriend and landed at her father’s house in Tallahassee, Fla. There, she admitted, she dealt with her anxiety by “drinking a lot.” In mid-September, her assistant Borrouso caught up to her by phone.

As Borrouso, also 48, watched the city begin to stabilize, she felt it was time for Courage-Knezeak to come home, to begin the stained-glass part of the rebuilding. “I said, `Get your butt back here,”’ Borrouso recalled.

Since then, Courage-Knezeak and Borrouso have had little time to spare. Each week seems to bring new post-hurricane glass disasters that require their attention. There are wind-torn church windows, beveled vestibule windows broken by zealous animal rescuers, and a flood-stained jewelry box that Courage-Knezeak said may have little monetary value but means a lot to the family that owned it.

“It’s been a difficult ride,” Courage-Knezeak said. “I was already set up and running, doing restoration before the storm, but who was prepared for this? … There are plenty of days I ask what’s keeping me here. But I want to see the city come back. … If you’re an artist, you’re meant to be here.

“I’m not a real religious person,” said Courage-Knezeak, a onetime Catholic, now an Episcopalian, “but I think God’s got a definite plan for me.”

Borrouso, a lifelong Catholic, agreed. “I feel we’re helping get the houses of the Lord ready for the people to come back. I feel honored.”

Courage-Knezeak doesn’t claim to be especially spiritual, but she and Borrouso have witnessed what they consider small-scale miracles amid the destruction: the stained-glass faces of Christ and the saints that survived shattering falls; the fact that the National Guard occupied Notre Dame Seminary for exactly 40 days and 40 nights; the discovery that the vexing Latin word they labored to re-create in one window meant sincerity.

In the shop window, backlit by sunlight, was their prized cosmic coincidence: an antique stained-glass window from St. Theresa of Avila Church. The inscription: “In Memory of the Storm of September 29th 1915.”

(Doug MacCash is an art critic for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.)

KRE/PH END MACCASH

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