THIS WON'T HAPPEN again until 2045. On Aug. 21, the thumb of God (with a little help from the moon) will smudge out the sun. A total solar eclipse will mark the brow of the United States with a Stygian darkness so deep that stars will unmask in midday. From Lincoln City, Ore., to Charleston, S.C., “flyover” America will go dark.
In Hebrew tradition, the darkening of the sun or reddening of the moon are markers of cataclysmic political events with spiritual consequences. In Greek, eclipse means “abandonment,” in Hebrew “defect.” God’s light is in a state of hiddenness.
In her essay “Total Eclipse,” Annie Dillard describes the solar eclipse visible in Yakima, Wash., in 1979, a shadow cast across the northern states. “In the black sky was a ring of light,” she writes. “It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over.”
It was like God closing the lid on the world, says Dillard—and the world beginning promptly to die.
Foundational to biblical teaching is that “creation” is God’s covenant with Israel. When God un-creates the world, the covenantal community (humans, field mice, nematodes, yuccas, summer storms, seedlings) simply withers. The “old, thin silver wedding band” God slipped on our finger millennia ago falls to dust.
“There were stars,” Dillard writes. “It was all over.”
While an eclipse doesn’t unmake the covenant, it does give us pause to remember it. In the eighth century B.C.E., the prophet Amos experienced a solar eclipse during the reign of King Jeroboam II. Amos declared God’s warning to Israel’s urban elite: “I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day” (8:9) to rouse them from their affluenza and heedless assent to legislation that put unsustainable burdens on the poor and demoralized those who sought justice in the courts. Darkness in the day would remind the powerful to “grieve over the ruin of Joseph” (6:6), the tarnished ring of the covenant.
AN ECLIPSE SHADOW sweeps across the landscape at more than 1,500 miles per hour, a veiled demon barreling down on anyone in its path. Onlookers have been known to scream.
America’s own political demons are stealthier, the evil we do seemingly more banal. Revenge or sadism doesn’t drive it. Instead we rather carelessly use evil as an instrument to an end—most often to establish dominance over a group not our own. When driven by high moral ideals (often religious, liberal and conservative), we may claim our “good cause” overrides the violent means of achieving it.
The danger of such idealistic evil is that it confers the right to hate. If “our group” intends what is good, then those “against us” must not be good. And is it not righteous to hate what is evil?
(At the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this spring, Trump said, “We can only overcome this evil if the forces of good are united and strong—and if everyone in this room does their fair share and fulfills their part of the burden.” His speech paved the way for U.S. weapons manufacturers to sign billion-dollar contracts with some of the world’s worst human rights offenders.)
This is our slow-motion shadow, the veiled demon that eclipses the human heart.
If you are in the path of totality on Aug. 21, you will be able to see layers in the sun—its corona, chromosphere, gusts of solar plasma. You will see the fire at the heart of everything.
Then it will all start over. The disc of the moon’s shadow will slip. Creation will groan, like a drowned person coughing up the sea. Again, the wedding band will be offered.
Will we renew our vows to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly” with our God?
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
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