Their Eyes Were Watching God

“I saw, early in the morning, the sun diminish against a backdrop of sky. I saw a circular piece of that sky appear, suddenly detached, blackened, and backlighted; from nowhere it came and overlapped the sun. It did not look like the moon. It was enormous and black. If I had not read that it was the moon, I could have seen the sight a hundred times and never thought of the moon once. (If, however, I had not read that it was the moon—if, like most of the world’s people throughout time, I had simply glanced up and seen this thing—then I doubtless would not have speculated much, but would have, like Emperor Louis of Bavaria in 840, simply died of fright on the spot.) It did not look like a dragon, although it looked more like a dragon than the moon. It looked like a lens cover, or the lid of a pot. It materialized out of thin air—black, and flat, and sliding, outlined in flame.” - Annie Dillard, “Total Solar Eclipse”My wife has a way, like the ancient magi, of knowing when certain celestial events will occur and whether or not they will be worth experiencing in person. Our best-laid plans rarely come to fruition, (mainly due to our stage of life), but we do fully intend on being outside late Monday morning to witness the blotting out of the "fair sun" by that "envious moon," whether we make the grand trip a bit northeast or end up just staying home.If you had asked me a few days ago how many celestial bodies are involved in a solar eclipse, I would have answered two, and I would have been wrong. The Sun and Moon are two, and Earth is the third. It seems so obvious once you point it out, but the planet we most easily forget when we gaze at the stars is the one that makes our gazing possible. The celestial spheres do innumerable fantastic things each second, and the moon is always between the Sun and something else– it’s when the earth is in the path of that great shadow that this becomes an Astronomical Event. Humanity, as Carl Sagan famously observed, is the point at which the universe looks back on itself in wonder. Because the earth falls within this event’s line of totality, and because humans - the creatures who marvel at Majesty - live there, a “total solar eclipse” is a thing.As we continue our series in Colossians, we find ourselves once again in the line of totality. Heaven and Earth collide and Christ is revealed in glory: God and man, King of all creation. And as the cosmos align in a spectacular array, here we are, just so positioned to participate; just small enough to look up in wonder.- Josh