A great light (and stained glass cookies!)
She was born into a dark world, but she could see more. When she said, “Let it be done to me,” she allowed herself to be pierced through, so that in this dark world, something could shine through.
Do you know how pinhole cameras work? I don’t, really, although I have seen what they can do. You block out the light in a closed-off area, except for one small hole, and direct light through that hole onto the opposite wall of the box. Then you will see a projected image of what’s outside, on the bright side -- except the image will be upside-down.
People build pinhole cameras intentionally, but sometimes they happen spontaneously. I recently saw photos from an Australian man whose whole garage became a camera obscura. The door faced the setting sun, and the insulating material that lines the top edge had a tiny gap; so when the man stepped into the dim interior, he could see clearly his driveway projected on the ceiling. The colored recycling bins, the front of his car, and even the pavement were all clearly there, upside down.
It was such a compelling image: The workaday car bumper and plastic bins projecting themselves up above, turning jewel-toned in the darkness. They had something important to say, and the thing was just: “I exist.”
Worth saying, and weirdly beautiful, and obscurely sad.
That was the work of a camera obscura. But did you know that everything is always projecting an image of itself on everything, all the time? We can’t see these images, because they all mix together and make white light. When a camera obscura gets involved, the pinhole blocks out all the images but one, and that’s why we can see it.
Maybe I’ve garbled the science, it makes sense to me as far as I understand it. Sometimes I become aware of this ceaseless projecting happening around me. I briefly know that every created thing – not only living things but everything that is made – proclaims its presence out of the sheer insistent, witless joy of being here. Everything that exists comes from God, and it can’t help sending something of itself out into the world, just because it is good. It’s a very simple message: “God made me, and now here I am!”
Sometimes I feel it, when I encounter the goodness of creation hidden in the hearts of wet grasses, buried under layers of loam, sparkling remotely in stars we rarely see, or in other dear artifacts of creation: In human love, in innocence, in beauty, in truth. Sometimes I see it, and I know deeply that creation is good. Most of the time, I don’t. It’s just too dark.
As I write, where I write from, we are counting down to the darkest day of the year. The calendar is like a box that gets a little smaller every day, with less and less light, less and less warmth, at a sharper and more narrow angle away from the sun.
That has, in fact, been the history of mankind. When God made the world, he made it so bright, so vital, so very fresh and alive. The water didn’t just sit, it teemed with life. God made it, and it was good; and then he gave it to us, and told us to multiply. The created world was so good that it shouted itself, projecting itself everywhere all the time, out of the simple joy of being something rather than nothing. It was a garden: Something that makes more of itself; and God and man walked together through it, beholding it, enjoying it.
Then came the box. Mankind sinned, and fabricated walls, a boundary between us and the Lord, and in the shadows we strained to see any goodness.
We began to be people living in darkness, and the history of mankind became the story of that box getting smaller and smaller.
But the box was not impermeable. It could be pierced, and it was. And that was the Incarnation.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
I am speaking of original sin as an evil thing, a dark box that blocks out the light and makes it so hard to see God’s goodness. But I am also grateful for original sin, because in the darkness it brought, in this terra obscura, we can see distinctly something that is otherwise invisible to us.
Maybe I’ve garbled the theology. But here is how it seems to me:
God never abandoned us, and the goodness of what he made never disappeared from the world, never stopped flowing out from him; but the joys that he prepared for us became obscure and hard to recognize in the darkness of original sin. Occasionally, for reasons known mainly the Holy Spirit, we do catch a glimpse, in the darkness, of the immeasurable vitality of creation. In the darkness we sometimes briefly see how good it is that there is something, rather than nothing -- even if what we see is upside down, distorted, and fleeting. Poignant, but compellingly beautiful. This is the world we made.
But Mary was different. Mary made the world different.
She was born into a dark world, but she could see more. When she said, “Let it be done to me,” she allowed herself to be pierced through, so that in this dark world, something could shine through.
Like every other created thing, she could not help shouting out the goodness of what God had made. But unlike any other created thing, she did something more than send out an image of herself. She put her body and soul in front of the light that is God, and let it pass through her. But her soul didn’t merely project the greatness of the Lord; it magnified it. What she sent out was not merely more of her: It was God himself.
Because of original sin, we live as people in darkness. Because of original sin, we have seen a great light. O happy sin of Adam; happy camera obscura, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.
Blessed Mary Obscura, who said “Let it be done to me,” and through that pinhole of her fiat, the light of the world became man.
Our Orthodox brothers call Mary “more spacious than the cosmos,” and sometimes, even in this present darkness, I can see that it is true. I don’t really understand it, but I have seen what it can do.
Stained Glass Cookies
Here is a recipe to impress your guests: Stained glass cookies.
This recipe is relevant because it is the time of year for making cookies, and please do not think very hard about light shining through melted Jolly Ranchers, and that being like the Incarnation, because it’s not. They’re just cookies. But they’re pretty, and the cookie dough, unlike some of you, does not require any chilling time.
Full disclosure, they do not taste exciting. They just taste like sugar and vanilla, and are really more of a blank slate for you to decorate however you want. It’s the recipe I always use when I want to use cookie cutters, because they hold their shape and do not get all puffy and blobby. Unlike some of me.
This recipe makes about 24 large cookies.
Ingredients:
1 cup butter
1 cup white sugar
2 tsp vanilla or almond extract
1 egg
3 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350.
Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until smooth.
Add the extract and the egg and continue to beat until combined.
In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt.
Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter and egg mixture, mixing until smooth.
(You can use the dough right away, but if you want to cut out cookies later, wrap the dough tightly in plastic wrap and store it in the refrigerator. If it gets very chilled, you may need to let it warm up a bit before you can roll it out.)
Lay a sheet of parchment paper on the counter and lightly flour it.
Roll out the dough to about 1/4 inch or thicker. If it’s sticky, flour the rolling pin.
Cut out shapes, and then carefully cut a smaller shape out of the center of each cookie. (Some ideas: A star window in a star, a heart window in a gingerbread man, an angel window inside a circle.) Be sure to leave a margin of dough all the way around the window in the center, so the cookie holds together.
Lay a sheet of parchment paper on a baking sheet. Carefully transfer the cookies onto the sheet, leaving a little space in between. The puff up a tiny bit, but not much.
Put some hard candies like Jolly Ranchers in a ziplock bag and pound them into bits with a hammer or meat tenderizer. You don’t have to completely pulverize the candy, but you want pieces no bigger than aquarium gravel. Carefully fill the windows in the cookies with the bits of candy, trying not to let any candy bits fall onto the dough. Fill in all the gaps, but don’t heap up the candy, as it may bubble as it bakes and overflow the window. You can add more than one color to a single window. It will mix a bit, but you should be able to see multiple colors in the finished cookie.
Bake 6-8 minutes. The cookies are done when the edges are just barely brown, but the surface of cookie is not browned. Let them sit in the pan untouched until they are cool. The cookies may look too soft and underdone, but they will firm up as they cool. When they are still hot out of the oven, you can pinch and reshape them a bit if necessary, before they firm up. If you are making multiple batches, you can carefully slide the entire sheet of parchment paper, with cookies still on it, onto a flat surface to finish cooling, so you can use the pan again.
You can leave the cookies undecorated, but tracing around the window of the cookie makes them much more impressive. I use royal icing made of egg whites and sugar, or I just buy the ready-made tubes of “cookie icing” that says on the package that it dries hard. These are cookies that will get handled a lot as people hold them up to the light, so you want a stable icing!
Once they have cooled for a few hours, they can be stacked.