Click or tap an image below to start viewing the exhibits.
In 1965–66 Jonah Jones created a body of work for the Jesuit retreat centre at Loyola Hall in Rainhill, just east of Liverpool. The main feature in the chapel was the two mirror-image Immortal Diamond windows of stained glass, based on the final lines in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond
Is immortal diamond.
Directly below these windows in the Blake Room are two smaller windows, representing the crown of thorns; seen from the outside with the lights on, the upper and lower windows form a continuum. As Jonah explained, “The immortal diamond in the windows looks ahead to a safe golden road in spite of thorns, through the cross to the light.” The retreat centre closed in 2014, and the building is now a hotel and spa known as Rainhill Hall. The windows are still there.
After Loyola Hall closed, other works by Jonah were moved elsewhere. His slate stations of the cross are now at St Beuno’s, Tremeirchion, while his carved wooden crucifix hangs at St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Primary School, Hurst Green, Lancashire. Click here to read our article in 2018 about what happened to Jonah’s other work after Loyola Hall closed. For earlier stories, use the ‘Loyola Hall’ tag below the article.