
Enthroned in the Heavens
Lanterns illumine me
Burning the memory
Rise innocent, rise innocent
No one has seen the sun. Its brightness is too overwhelming. It appears to our feeble eyes an incomprehensible blaze. We can only look at representations of it, an image imprinted onto film or electronic sensors, a heavenly body crammed onto a terrestrial plane. We can observe its rays reflecting off the matter that makes up the earth, giving it life and energy. We feel its heat driving the forces shaping our world. There is nothing on the globe the sun doesn’t touch. Our home is hurtling through space driven by the sun’s gravity.
We live each day under the sun’s never-faltering stare. We cannot escape it. It is present even when it is hidden. There is no living without it. It as close to us as the air we breathe, and yet separated from us by a veil of sheer power. It sits above us monitoring everything we do, and yet we cannot look at it directly. We are ever-aware of its reign, and yet never able to enter its throne room.
And yet…
Every eighteen months (give or take) celestial cycles merge in a solar eclipse, and the veil between us thins. The moon, a flat, circular wafer, intersects the path of the sun for a brief moment. The lifeless sphere, itself driven along by solar gravity, pauses between us and sun, soaking up the brightness and revealing qualities that otherwise can only be imagined. The two combine into a sparkling signet and become “the future descending like a bright chandelier”. The disc, cold and inert, becomes a channel for the sun’s glory, a tunnel ferrying us up into the sun’s inviting warmth. Light and heat become solid rock.
For a few moments we can stand looking around in wonder, our minds wrapped in an shadow-less, inebriating glow. We are left wondering if we’ve been transported into another world, or if another world has suddenly permeated ours. During this brief event “heaven is so big there ain’t no need to look up.”
The experience is both intimate and communal. The sun comes down and dwells among us, uniting us in awe. Its aura is no respecter persons, falling on people from every tribe and nation. There is not a location on the earth where the shadow of the moon has not reached with its ethereal power.
This is an experience that happens to us, not one we can initiate. We can only place ourselves in the path, and wait for it to consume us. We gather together at the appointed place, toss our hooks into the air, and wait to be caught up into the marvelous.
The eclipse is a profound and apocalyptic event. It reveals light we could not otherwise see. It pulls back the veil to expose that glory that surrounds us, through which we wander unknowingly each day of our lives. In doing this it changes us, some more deeply than others, but no one is quite the same. Having changed us it draws us back to itself. We yearn to dive back into its glow once again, to go through the metamorphosis another time.
This celestial encounter has been occurring since the birth of the moon, and will continue to occur until the sun envelops us all. It is a singular event that reappears over and over again. This moment out of time contains all of us who have ever been in it, and all who ever will be. It is the union of past, present, and future. Its revelation will never loose its power to inspire and invigorate and breathe a new kind of life into us.
