For Wilshire Baptist Church
Are you ready for the solar eclipse on April 8? Do you know where you are going to watch? Do you have your protective glasses? Have you got your guest list and your party menu planned and . . . ?
Those are questions that came into view in late January when we took a quick trip to the Texas Hill Country. It turns out there are communities all along the “path of totality” that are marketing the heck out of the eclipse. They’re planning watch parties and events and letting it be known they are the place to be for the best eclipse-watching experience, and the best place to be before and after with their hotels, restaurants and shops. After hearing all the hype, I was almost convinced we needed to be in Waco or Kerrville or back on top of Enchanted Rock to see the total eclipse as it’s meant to be seen. As it turns out, however, all of Dallas-Fort Worth is within the path of totality. All we need to do is step outside our own house from 1:40 to 1:44 p.m. on April 8 and we can experience the entire event.
Unless, of course, it is overcast on that day. If that happens, we would experience nothing but a dimming of the light somewhere up above the clouds. That would be a disappointment for sure after all the buildup, and it very well could happen that way for anyone along the path of totality that stretches from the Rio Grande southwest of Uvalde up to Texarkana then through Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and on up to the coast of Maine.
LeAnn and I know something about that type of celestial disappointment. A few years ago we went to Big Bend National Park and signed up for a nighttime stargazing session at McDonald Observatory, considered one of the darkest, clearest places in the continental United States and thus ideal for stargazing. What we didn’t realize when we scheduled the trip was the moon would be in full phase that night. They still had the session, but we couldn’t see many stars – less, in fact, than if we had been at a museum planetarium. Our stargazing adventure was hampered by light pollution, natural though it was.
On the other hand, the moon was magnificent. As an old cowboy song says, “the moon was as bright as a reading light.” Walkways at the observatory were well illuminated by the full, bright moon, and I dare say we could have driven back safely to our lodging in Terlingua with the car lights off if it weren’t for the presence of other motorists and the possibility of wildlife crossing the highway.
We hear about light pollution a lot. That word “pollution” automatically puts a negative spin on anything it touches, and in this case, it even puts light in a bad light. But how can that be? Isn’t light good? Isn’t light the source and provider of life, warmth, illumination for education? At Christmas don’t we string lights around trees and across rooftops to share the good news of “the light of the world”?
In church a couple of weeks ago our organist Jeff Brummel played an arrangement of “I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light.” It’s one of my favorite hymns because it’s full of so much aspirational hope. It speaks of being a “child” of the light, and not an adult. That resonates with me, because to believe in the light, you have to have the faith of a child that still can imagine the unimaginable, and quite frankly, I’ve lived long enough and seen and heard enough to harbor plenty of doubt. Still, the hymn text seems to be written for people like me. The hymn doesn’t say, “I’m going to walk as a child of the light,” but rather, “I want to walk as a child of the light.” It implies there’s still some darkness on the path and we need help finding our way.
I really do want to walk as a child of the light, but sometimes I feel like I’m stumbling around in the dark. Even then, the hymn speaks to me again: “In him there is no darkness at all, the night and the day are both alike.” It’s like that stargazing night: We couldn’t see the wonder of God’s creation in the twinkle of a billion stars, but it was there just the same, big and bright as day in the presence of the full moon.
And it will be there in the eclipse whether we can see it or not. Even if the sun gets clouded out where I am or wherever you are, the eclipse will still be happening. The heavenly light is always there whether we see it or not.