Thoughts from the Eclipse

On April 8th, my little family drove north a few hours to greet the eclipse at its totality. We arrived early in the morning and spent the day under the bright sun, on the lakeshore, tucked among mountains and only a little way from the Canadian border. As the day drew on, more and more people pulled into our little lakeside lot. Some got stuck in the slippery, late season snow and had to be guided out by friendly strangers. Dogs barked, children played, hipsters smoked pot on the bed of their truck, and a trio of elderly sisters set their chairs out under the sun and knitted away between the woods and the lake. By eclipse-time, we had all become neighbors.

We noticed a chill in the air before we caught the shadows lengthening. On the lake, wood ducks started calling to each other uncertainly – suddenly, it was later than they’d thought. Looking up with our dark glasses, we could see a bite had been taken out of the sun. Neighbor called to neighbor, “eclipse glasses” were passed around, and then the night came.

Stars burst out under the dark sun and the lake around us erupted with howls. Magic was happening in the sky above us and our neighbors wanted to participate. It was the welcoming night, the night that, as Rilke wrote, “extends itself for [Christ’s] sake” and makes the earth “like new because of His voice.”

It was a game, played in love for the delight that Christ takes in causing beauty; and we all reveled in it.

Christ and the Intellect

One of the aspects of personality I’ve always loved most in people is the ability to be present in experiences. I think they call it “mindfulness” now, but it always feels like the mind has very little to do with it. I think of it as embodiment – being fully in the body during experiences.

Dostoyevsky once wrote that “you won’t get anywhere through intellect,” and he’s not far off. Intellect is delightful and it can be a great help in making sense of the world around us. It can also be a hinderance and a distraction – especially if we allow ourselves to become overly focused on our own intellect. There is a delightful story of St. Augustine of the Abundant Intellect. He was pondering the Trinity and struggling to understand the depths and truths of the Trinitarian God.

As he pondered, Augustine walked on the shores of the Mediterranean and watched the waves crashing onto the shore. He saw a small boy scooping up sea water and pouring it into a hole in the sand. The water quickly soaked into the sand and the boy kept pouring sea water into an empty hole in the sand. St. Augustine asked the boy what he was trying to do, and the boy answered that he was putting the sea into his hole. Augustine laughed – “Don’t you know that the sea will never fit into such a tiny hole?”

“Neither will the mystery of the Trinity fit into your tiny mind, beloved Augustine,” responded the Child, who laughed up at the brilliant man and disappeared. Christ seems to love appearing as a pert Child to the very wise, as if He thinks the wise need to remember to embrace life as bodies and souls as well as minds.

Howling Wisdom

I think some of my howling neighbors at the eclipse understood the wisdom of Christ well. They let the darkness flow over their bodies and awaken their spirits. They laughed and called out greetings to the moon. One enthusiastic eclipser stripped naked and leapt, howling into the icy lake to greet the freshly “solared” water. It reminded me of the Russian Epiphany tradition of blessing the water and then immersing – naked – into its cold, but newly sanctified depths.

Søren Kierkegaard once said that “what our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.” The truth is, reflection is much more comfortable. It’s easy to sit and think about the eclipse. It’s easy to wonder what God might be saying through it. It’s even easier to use it as a “teaching moment” for our children. The eclipse is like the Eucharist, like faith, like love. It is much harder in this passionless age to allow ourselves to feel something deeply – without trying to distance ourselves from those feelings through reason.

But God is asking for passion. He’s asking for people who feel deeply and leap into those feelings as whole selves. “I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth,” He says in Revelations 3:15–16.

Quiet Wisdom

Don’t worry, you don’t have to howl like wolves in the darkness or leap naked into an icy lake to prove your passion for God or beauty or life. The elderly, knitting ladies didn’t do any of those things, and they still radiated a full-hearted love of the beauty around them. They sat, enraptured. Their eclipse glasses firmly over their everyday glasses, gazing up at the blanketed sun in delight.

Looking at them, I got the feeling they’d driven miles to meet a beloved friend. That whatever the distance, the drive felt like an opportunity, not an effort. The passion of faith, of love. It made me wonder if I give the same amount of myself to my relationships. It made me think of how, when we had surprise access to the car one weekday, my daughter immediately thought “yay! We can make it to daily Mass!” and I had to work up the enthusiasm to take her.

Life is so magical. The natural world is so full of those incredible moments that don’t need to be distilled down into lessons to touch our souls. Take a look around you this month. Think, with the poet Rilke, “if your daily life seems poor, don’t blame it”; instead remind yourself that “this really is a fairy tale, … [you] sit … among lovely, inestimable things, in chambers that are filled with the mood of [God] creating.”

Let those lovely things touch you so that God can create abundantly in your heart.