darkness

 

I heard about the total eclipse on NPR while driving to the North Padre Bible Study. When I arrived at the site for our meeting, I went ahead and set my alarm for 4:15 a.m. so that I wouldn't forget to do it later. I recently learned from Barbara Brown Taylor's Book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, that sleeping 8 hours straight through a night is a modern invention anyway. What better night (early morning) to get up and play in the dark than on the night of this eclipse. In the early morning, when my alarm woke me, Laura asked what was going on, and I reminded her about the eclipse. Then I went out to find that it had already begun. The Earth's Shadow was crawling across the face of the moon as the orbits of the earth and moon aligned just right to shadow the sun's light. After I saw what was happening, I went back inside to make coffee, then found my binoculars. The light from the moon was so bright it was difficult to look at it through binoculars at first, but as the shadow slowly stretched across the moon over the next hour, the beautiful spectacle had us passing the binoculars back and forth .We also got a glimpse of Uranus, only visible once the bright, reflected sunlight was shadowed. 

Eli woke up on his own and found us out on the porch enjoying coffee and the cosmic display. He eventually got bored and I put him back into his bed to sleep a while longer. I opened the blinds as the eastern sky started to lighten a bit, and found that from the chair where I sit to pray each morning I could see both the growing light from the moon as the eclipse ended in the still-dark-western sky, and the growing light of the sun as the earth rotated that great light (to rule the day) into view. I sat and read a bit, then I scribbled down the bits of a dream that I could remember, and I wrote about the eclipse. Early this summer, I went on the Inner Journey Retreat with the theme "Owning your Own Shadow." Here, in the eclipse, I got to see the earth's shadow: our shadow.

Between the influences of that retreat, and Barbara Brown Taylor's book, I've been paying attention to the dark parts of life; that rich-soil place where we are sometimes afraid to dwell, but that has spiritual treasure waiting for each of us. It is where our deepest calling dwells. It is where our deepest fears lurk. It is where the unexamined bits of our lives collect and from where they nudge us in seemingly unexplainable ways. It's the realm in which Jacob wrestled the Lord, in which Abraham witnessed God's covenant being sealed, and into which Mary birthed Jesus.

Soon it was time to wake Eli up again and get ready for the daylight-life. I was left sleepy, but giddy, from the experience. Watching the Earth's shadow in the eclipse of the moon was quite a spiritual experience. To witness a natural process like that stirred my own soul to a place of curiosity and awareness. Spending time in the dark prepared me to spend time in the light.