Raymond Arroyo visits Salt + Light

Matthew Harrison

October 17, 2007
Raymond Arroyo and Father Thomas on the Witness setWe at Salt + Light were delighted to welcome Raymond Arroyo to our studios today. Raymond, as many of you know, is the popular host of "The World Over" on EWTN. He's also well known for his biography on EWTN foundress Mother Angelica, and more recently Mother Angelica's Little Book of Life Lessons and Everyday Spirituality.
While visiting us, he took part in a Witness interview with Father Thomas Rosica, to be broadcast later this fall, and also spoke with David Naglieri for our daily update Zoom.
Afterwards, the Salt + Light staff gathered together with Raymond enjoying some refreshments, and chatting about a number of topics ranging from his start at EWTN to his fondness for Marshal McLuhan to his involvement in an oratorio entitled "The Birth of Christ." But one of the most striking comments he made was the notion that we are in an age of stained glass windows.
David Naglieri and Raymond Arroyo on the Zoom setStained glass windows one may ask?
I believe his argument was that we get bogged down in words. We loose the beauty, and the meaning of the message.
He suggested we consider the times in Church history where stained glass windows were used to tell a story; where the illiterate in the pew could look at the beauty of the stained glass, and understand the beauty of the Gospel.
He is right that today we are in a stained glass age. We at Salt + Light are in television, we use images to tell stories. We use images to express the beauty of the Gospel and our Catholic faith that we see lived out daily around us. That's something we often forget; we allow our stories to get clouded and faded. Our stories can loose their vibrancy, their colour, and the Gospel and our faith becomes washed out.
Today offered a refreshing reminder that we must always strive to accentuate the beauty and glory of the Gospel, and we at Salt + Light have a responsibility to capture it and to share it with you, our viewer.
But it's not just us at Salt + Light who have this responsibility. All of us are called to be the salt of the earth, the flavour of the Gospel, and the light to the world -- shining boldly through the stained glass!