A reflection on a moment of extra-worldly beauty as we get ready for the change in seasons and our never-ending political dramas
Five years ago, my son took this photo of me and my wife during the middle of the total solar eclipse that crossed the United States mainland that day. We were standing on top of a high bluff in the hills of eastern Wyoming, somewhere west of Casper, and we had an unobstructed 360-degree view of the horizon as it suddenly faded to sunset red. Above us the eclipsed sun stood coolly against the dark blue sky. I’m not sure anymore, but I think we could also see Mars and Venus off to the right, and I had this sense that I was seeing our Sun in clear perspective, just 93 million miles away, a real object that we could almost touch, set against the distant stars of the rest of the Milky Way. The feeling didn’t last long, but while it did, I thought: now I see exactly where we are in relation to the rest of the universe!
If you are someone who tries to pay attention to the news, it gets harder all the time to maintain perspective, I think. Sometimes earthly events being us back to ground: yesterday I helped my cousins put their 98-year-old father to rest. Born in 1923, he had made it almost to 99, and nearly all of those years in robust health other than Alzheimer’s related dementia. An white American man born in 1923, as he was, had a life expectancy of 56 years; he lived an extra 43. Perspective.
Or, as happened this morning, you get served a reminder of something that you did five years ago, a moment when a couple million of us stood still and watched the sky in awe. Perspective.
The daily buzz of news items interrupts that flow because the way information comes to us now lacks almost all perspective. We are in the grip of gigantic, historic shifts in how we live and how we understand the world around us. Like the ordinary people whose lives and communities were thrown into upheaval by the cataclysms of World Wars One and Two, we are being carried by forces far bigger than our own volition: decades of historic segregation and discrimination; an economic crisis that cost millions of people their homes or their retirement savings followed by massive bailouts and tax cuts favoring the wealthy and well-connected; unfinished and unsuccessful wars; dramatic cuts to public education and public health; mind-scrambling new forms of entertainment and socialization.
Against those forces and trends, reasonable people of good will struggle to organize themselves to defend against their worst fears and improve their lives and the conditions of their communities. Being human, they squabble and they make mistakes. Being caught in history, they make these moves inside of artificial boundaries and rules written by men who are long dead. Occasionally they succeed and often they don’t. Right now it feels as if the zeitgeist is shifting in a perhaps better direction but we still now our country is deeply divided and frankly filled with people ready to give up on democracy itself because they have fallen in thrall of madness. It’s enough to make anyone want to turn inward and give up. Or, you remember why you do what you do: the people who inspired you, the books or teachings, the sources and values from your own faith tradition if you have one.
As the world spins forward and summer in the northern Hemisphere starts to fade, for me this is a moment to reflect and renew. We live in a world filled with beauty and pain. As we strive to lessen the latter, never forget the former.