Power & Light

Time hurtles on.  We swoop through space on our little teeming rock, already forgetting the news that was everywhere two weeks ago.  Just two weeks ago . . .

Campers and vans were already clogging two-lane roads in Oregon and hysterical headlines were predicting traffic nightmares in Nashville and St. Joe MO.  But when Monday arrived we were on the road by 8:30 a.m. and encountered no complications on the two-hour to the “path of totality.”  After reaching the mid-size Midwestern town of our destination we found a city park, stretched out legs, watched the kids run around the playground, spread our blankets for a picnic and kept an eye on the sky.

I don’t need to describe a total eclipse of the sun: enough has been written already.  To me, it was both greater and less than anticipated.  I expected darkness but it was more like a bright moonlight or even a very heavy cloud cover (like before a tornado—I’ve seen that too).  I expected more stars, but we only saw Venus (I think) glowing wanly as though embarrassed to be waking up so early.  Totality was indeed spectacular: when the round disk of the moon slipped over the sun a gasp went around the park and a cry went up, as though we were cheering some great accomplishment.  Which was true enough.  The sun was suddenly, indescribably, a void—a hole in the sky surrounded by a writhing circle of subtly-colored rays, like nothing ever seen in all creation.

All the more astonishing when compared to only a few moments before.  We’re so accustomed to the sun: glorying in it after a long winter, sweltering under it during a long summer; joyfully welcoming it after days of rain, desperately wishing it would hide its face after weeks of drought.  But I never really appreciated the power of the sun until I watched it whittled down to almost nothing: a sliver, 5% or less of surface exposed.  And still as bright as day, forbidding as death, fully capable of singeing your eyeballs.  All its power present in every part or portion of it: if it could be cut in pieces, every piece would burn just as bright as the whole.

St. Francis addressed it as Brother Sun, bringing the flaming chariot of the gods down to human level.  And he wasn’t wrong.  Our immortal souls will outlast that ball of gas in the new heavens and new earth, where God Himself is our Light.  But it doesn’t do to get too cocky.  If the sun is a brother creature, he’s a big BIG brother, bending us under an elbow one minute and affectionately tousling our little heads the next, for the rest of our earthly lives.

Less than a week later, the sun hid its face from the Texas coast and thousands of people had their lives dramatically changed.  Anyone I know?  Not personally, but friends of relatives and relatives of friends.  The stately dance of the heavens is forgotten when calamity strikes close to home—down here where wind and clouds stomp around like rowdy kids.  Nobody was looking up (certainly not with NASA-approved paper glasses) except to pray desperately for the rain to stop.  Disaster usually comes from the sky, where the storehouses of wind (Ps. 135:7) and precipitation (Job 38:22) occasionally bust open and let us have it.  All for a reason, say the faithful.  No reason at all, just blind lunacy, say the skeptics.  To both sides, it’s proof of whatever they already believe.

As for me, I believe in Power.  And Light.  Specifically, I believe they have a Name, and that Name knows my name, and because of it I can lie down in safety.