Art: Jade in Church

In Chicago last week, the North Shore Baptist Church dedicated a novel new window. The design is simple enough—a small (6½ ft. high, 3½ ft. wide), bare cross with a single inscribed rosette on a plain background, done in soft rose, clear white, and a dozen shades of cool green. What makes it unique and arresting is that it consists of 446 pieces of beautifully cut and polished jade.

The North Shore Baptists owe their precious window to Baptist Millionaire James Lewis Kraft, 77-year-old founder of Kraft Foods, and an ardent lapidary in his spare time. Cheesemaker Kraft began collecting rare natural stones one day in the ’20s when he was out driving and saw some people scrambling up a mountain. Told that they were “rockhounds” hunting for rarities, he joined the group, has been a rockhound ever since.

Jade, and the tooling of jade, became Kraft’s specialty. He set up stoneworking shops for children’s homes, wrote a book, Adventure in Jade, on his expeditions up & down the U.S. He even took his hobby to work. At sales’ meetings Businessman Kraft would hand out jade lucky charms from his workshop, sandwich in a little pep talk. “Rub this between the palms of the hand until warm,” he would say, “make a wish, then go out and work like hell.”

Kraft thinks his church’s new window is a fitting climax for his rugged hobby. Ten years ago no one thought there was enough good jade in all the North American continent for such a thing. It took Kraft and a small army of prospector friends five years to prove them wrong. Roaming the U.S., they found the bright greens in tiny pockets from Alaska to Wyoming, discovered the rare rose jade in a single small boulder in California, the even rarer white jade in a steep Arizona canyon. Kraft studied great windows of the past, decided that a simple cross would be the best design, then began cutting the hard stone to a thickness of three millimeters (about as thick as a half-dollar). He had to call in professional lapidaries to help with the cutting and polishing, but still managed to turn out some 100 pieces in his own workshop.

No one knows how valuable Chicago’s new window really is. Kraft guesses that the jade and labor that went into it, if ordered in the market, would have come to perhaps $1,500,000. But Baptist Kraft is not thinking about the value. Jade, he says, has a special place in a Christian church: “From the beginning of time, jade has symbolized truth, goodness and beauty.”