At the climax of the crucifixion story, darkness comes over the land. Jesus, crowned with thorns, cries out. The earth quakes; the temple curtain is ripped in two. God’s moment of biggest love looks like defeat: a fissure between heaven and earth. But, the Gospels hold, this isn’t the top of the story. The darkness ends, and Sunday morning comes. The stone in front of the grave is rolled away. “Do not be afraid,” an angel declares. “He has risen.”
I’ve often wished I had been there to see this cosmic event with my very own eyes. To witness it. To know beyond a shadow of a doubt this was the Son of God. Alas, I wasn’t. I’ve seen no visible stone rolled back nor angelic appearances to light my shadowy doubts or fill those tenacious cracks of spiritual night.
But I actually have seen a complete solar eclipse.
I witnessed the eclipse in 2017, camping within the Smoky Mountains. It’s easy to explain the events leading as much as it: the eight-hour drive, the fear about clouds, the marshmallows, mosquitos, and constructing excitement. But tips on how to describe when the moment hit?
Here are some words I wrote down: wind, cold, 360-degree sunset, crickets, stars, the top of the world.
You see it coming. There’s a shadow, 100 miles wide, racing toward you, faster than thought. And then it hits. In my memory, it’s like plunging under water. The sound all changes, with a swoosh, like in movies. And the sunshine—it’s not water you’re swimming in. It’s liquid metal. Everything silver, platinum, bizarre. The sun is gone, replaced by an ink-black pupil surrounded with a wild white iris of solar atmosphere.
“Or a morsel of bone,” writes creator Annie Dillard in her essay “Total Eclipse.” “I pray you won’t ever see anything more awful within the sky.”
Awful in all of the senses of the word. In Scripture, when people encounter angels, they respond with terror and worship. A complete solar eclipse is similar. Indeed, I’ve read that within the yr 840, Emperor Louis of Bavaria saw the world plunged into eclipse for five long minutes and died of fright. In Syria, one in every of the sooner records of an eclipse, about 1223 before Christ, is accompanied by a note. It says, “Two livers were examined: danger.”
To experience a complete eclipse is to cry out, to feel the earth shake, to feel a fissure between heaven and earth. But also to be filled with awe.
In 1806, a condemned criminal, brought from his dungeon to witness the eclipse, raised his manacled arms to the sky.
“There seems an instinctive sense … akin to awe … whispering to our spirits,” wrote James Fenimore Cooper in response to that very same eclipse. “Never have I beheld any spectacle which so plainly manifested the majesty of the Creator, or so forcibly taught the lesson of humility to man.”
My memory struggles to carry the totality of all of it. I do know my mouth hung open, overcome.
And then the sun comes back again. A sunrise in midday. The great stone within the sky rolled away, and light-weight returned.
Some might object that any parallels between the events of Easter and the events of an eclipse go too far. What mystery is there in something I can explain to children with a vibrant flashlight and supplies from Walmart?
1 / 4-inch ball of Play-Doh can, when aligned excellent, represent the moon and forged a small shadow over a one-inch marshmallow earth about 30 inches away. Even if you should get into the complicated orbital mechanics that make predicting eclipses a graduate-level mathematics exercise, we understand how the moon’s orbit is tipped, like a gyrating hula hoop, relative to the earth’s. We can calculate the sun’s small tugs that make that hoop precess like a top, compute its rocking like a baby’s circus mobile.
Nothing particularly extraordinary: only a 2,200-mile-wide rock blocking some light. No mystery here: just an 80-million-trillion-ton orb of iron and silicon swinging between us and our life-giving star at 2,300 miles per hour.
I’m reminded of Moses, when he climbed Mount Sinai to learn God’s laws and asked to see God’s glory. God allowed Moses to glimpse just his back as he passed by—face in full eclipse. When Moses returned, the Scriptures say, his face was radiant from even this obscured glance.
Eclipses don’t have any practical profit. They don’t have anything so as to add to crop production or latest scientific studies. They appear to be a likelihood alignment, a coincidence of a moon 400 times smaller and in addition 400 times closer than our sun. In fact, in just a few hundred million years, the moon could have receded far enough from the earth that total solar eclipses will now not occur.
And yet, for now, every couple of years (for a narrow strip a minimum of somewhere on the earth), they do. In my years as an astronomer, the more I learn of this delicate dance, with its precessing nodes and pirouetting axes, the more, I realize, my face begins to glow.
“God laughs and plays,” David James Duncan wrote. And Carl Sagan, for all his agnosticism, was right when he said, “We know we’re approaching the best of mysteries.”
Still, I approach with caution. The primary rule of solar-eclipse watching is to not look directly on the sun. Except during those few moments of complete totality, you should use specially designed eclipse glasses that block 99.99 percent of the sunshine or use the reflected light of a pinhole camera, which effectively does the identical.
There’s an identical theological truth. On that mountain God hid Moses within the crevice of a rock and covered him together with his hand until he’d passed by. And me—where does God place me that I’d glimpse his glory, except perhaps within the crevice of long shadows, like those forged by a rugged wood cross?
“Every object near a star wears a cone of night,” writes astronomer Chet Raymo. “Near every star there’s a hoop of cone-shaped shadows that time into space like a crown of thorns. … Every particle of dust within the space of the solar system casts its own tiny pyramid of darkness.”
On a chalkboard I can draw lines and circles showing how the moon, earth, and planets carve narrow cone-shaped shadows within the sun’s light, 100 times taller than they’re wide. How the a part of the earth and the moon facing the sun are experiencing daytime, and because the earth spins into its pyramid of shadow, we experience night.
Night is a thorn we cannot escape; only from space can we see its sharpness.
In college I spent a big period of time pondering the issue of pain. I dove into apologetic, mental solutions, just like the need for selection or freedom or contrast to bring out joy. Good in a classroom but weak within the face of real, lived pain. Why can an excellent God allow for all of the suffering, all of the evil that blankets this world? I still don’t have any answers.
But I do have eclipses.
An eclipse is a reminder that shadows have suggestions and that night exists only within the narrow shafts of shadow. When we experience a complete solar eclipse, we experience the very peak of the moon’s night, stroking the earth with the lightest brush of an ink-dipped feather. Blink and it’s done. But it’s enough to remind us of this gift: In space, night has edges. We live not in a universe of darkness but in a universe awash in light.
As Raymo adds, “Earth’s cone of night is the Paraclete that brings the gift of deep space and deep time.”
I have no idea why, if God is loving, he tolerates evil. But I do know that, astronomically speaking, it takes night—real material darkness—to see. Without the narrow cracks of night within the sun’s encompassing light, we’d know nothing of distant galaxies, of forming stars. Earth and heaven are connected through the narrow night.
Job, brave enough to confront God in his pain, receives what I’ve long considered a not-so-comforting reply: “Where were you once I laid the earth’s foundation? … What is the approach to the abode of sunshine?” And yet, my friend Anna identified to me, Job responds with favor. God gave Job, apparently, precisely the answer he needed.
And I’ve been given an eclipse, a sliver of night, a fissure through which the universe shines. In the dark, within the tip of the moon’s shadow, I behold an abundance of mathematics, motion, and awe. The light of the world descends to darkness but then comes again—a touch of resurrection.
Luke Leisman is a research professor on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and blogs about astronomy in on a regular basis life at substack.
