St. Andrews’ English Church of Biarritz is now a tiny, flickering shrine.

Metz Cathedral glows blood red.

Part of a current Washington State History Museum exhibit, these three churches are among 25 honored in works of glass art. “Remembered Light: Glass Fragments from World War II, The McDonald Windows” is the culmination of a collaboration between a U.S. Army chaplain who, during his World War II service, collected hundreds of stained glass shards from bombed European churches and synagogues, and a group of artists who enshrined those shards in “windows” of their own. The result is a fascinating and profound journey.

The journey begins with the Rev. Frederick McDonald, who traveled Europe in 1944 with Gen. Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group. Spending 12 months in Germany, Holland, Belgium, France and England, McDonald picked up glass shards from ruined sanctuaries, talked with survivors and held services. The shards he wrapped in newspaper and kept in labeled envelopes.

For 55 years, they remained stored in a cardboard box, until a chance dinner with friends in 1999 resulted in a meeting with French-born California glass artist Armelle Le Roux.

The idea to set the shards into glass memorials developed into a seven-year project involving 13 artists, continuing after McDonald’s death in 2002.

Now complete, the windows will be dedicated on Jan. 21 and eventually come to rest in a specially built interfaith chapel at the Presidio in San Francisco. Before that, however, they’re touring the country, and the Washington State History Museum is their first stop.

It’s a good venue for them. These windows are not just art: Like the destroyed stained glass windows that inspired them, they tell stories. Incorporating found and created objects as well as paint, lead, ceramic, copper and other materials, they also have etched or painted onto them the text of McDonald’s own memories of each place and its people. Artist statements explain symbolism, while large wall panels display on-the-scene photographs of McDonald and give historical context. McDonald himself speaks in an introductory video made before his death. There are a lot of layers to each piece, a lot of reading and looking and looking again.

“Coventry Cathedral” is one such. Near the front of the exhibit, the memorial to this famous English church is one of several made by Le Roux.

Its upper two-thirds shine through hundreds of small rectangles of glass, clear in the middle and painted around the edges, while beneath is the church itself, smoky-brown and overlaid with the original shards. As the text explains, it’s an image that echoes the real cathedral, which was rebuilt after its devastation in the Battle of Britain to incorporate both such a tall window and the original ruins.

The complexity of the light also bears long looking. All of the windows, mounted as they are on triangular metal frames a foot away from the wall, reflect light either down into the viewer’s standing space or behind them onto the wall.

In “Thionville, France,” also by Le Roux, the six clear shards are set into thick lead, like buildings in a town map surrounded by McDonald’s painted words. In the reflection, the words slide backwards into gibberish while the town explodes gently into a fog of light.

In Narcissus Quagliata’s “Metz, France,” the cathedral’s shards are incorporated into a crown of thorns, while the red backing glass shines bloody on the wall behind.

As art, the windows sometimes dive into sentimentality, aided by the incorporation of memorabilia (the ’40s advertising on one of McDonald’s envelopes) or of the text itself. Sometimes the lighting doesn’t work – ideally, these windows should have strong backlighting, like real church windows.

Yet the point is not so much the art as how it tells this story of destruction, war and the hope of peace – McDonald’s own desire, says Le Roux.

Perhaps most poignant in this telling is one of the final pieces, “The Russian Chapel” from Wiesbaden.

In a circle of medieval indigo and gold, a woman stands, shards outlining her agonized face and outstretched body. Inspired by a woman McDonald met at the site, whose child had been blasted out of her arms during the raid, she is the epitome of loss and grief, set into a unified beauty.

McDonald only saw 15 of these windows before he died. Yet the McDonald Memorial Peace Windows are a powerful testimony both to his actions and the beauty he saw destroyed.

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568

rosemary.ponnekanti @thenewstribune.com

What: “Remembered Light: Glass Fragments from World War II, The McDonald Windows”

Who: Washington State History Museum

When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 5-8 p.m. Thursdays, noon-5 p.m. Sundays through March 2

Where: 1911 Pacific Ave, Tacoma

Admission: $6, $7, $8; free for 5 and younger

Contact: 1-888-BE-THERE, www.washingtonhistory.org