Eclipse

This Friday morning our part of the world can watch (clouds permitting!) as the moon briefly passes in front of the sun. Up north in the Faroe Islands, the sun will be completely masked; across the Highlands we expect it to be over 90% hidden. During the eclipse, daylight will be weaker than normal.

You can imagine our distant ancestors watching the start of an eclipse with mounting terror. The moon begins to swallow the sun, the light dims, you fear that the sun will never return, that you’ll be perpetually in darkness. Now we can predict and anticipate – we know the next eclipse of this scale to be visible in the UK will be on 23rd September 2090.

For us, though, an eclipse is a powerful symbol of events which cast our lives into shadow. Bad things happen – bereavement, accidents, mental health issues, unemployment, broken relationships, addiction – and darkness swallows up our joy.

I remember standing outside the office in Harbour Road back in 1999 watching through a clouded filter the last significant eclipse in the Highlands. How much darkness have we seen since that early autumn day, when ‘9/11’ was meaningless, and ebola and Islamic terrorism low on our radar, and ‘tsumani’ simply a word in a dictionary.

As Christians, our faith through light and darkness rests in Jesus Christ, the filter through which we safely view the wonder of God. In his dying, Jesus we believe passed through literal darkness, the darkness of pain, and the eclipse of God’s face into the light of new life beyond death.  We believe Jesus doesn’t simply show us the way to the far side of the eclipse but that he is the way.

We believe he did not simply experience the journey through darkness into light, but that he makes that journey possible. It’s as though he clothed himself with darkness, and then transformed that darkness into a robe of dazzling light.

We can predict solar eclipses, but we are powerless to influence their timing. Sometimes we wonder if the dark times we pass through, are unavoidable and fated.  In some cases they result from our own decisions and bad choices, and we can avoid such darkness in future by choosing well. And we can never quantify the darkness we are protected from as we pray and entrust ourselves to God.

But other things – ill-health, accident, natural disaster, the random pain which is part of being human - seem entirely unpredictable. Are these things simply ‘fated’?

These things are known by God, and so we must say are allowed by God. But the word ‘fated’ suggests a cruel, impersonal process, and God is not cruel, or impersonal. But then we ask why God permits such pain and we find ourselves thinking things about God we have never allowed ourselves to think before. Is the real God nothing like the God we thought we knew?

And this eclipse is the worst eclipse of all, when our sense of God’s presence is swallowed up in a great and terrible darkness and we find ourselves saying with Christ ‘My God! Why have you forsaken me?’ Are we, after all, alone in the universe, the playthings of a merciless fate?

We stand at on the edge of the abyss, the ground crumbing at our feet, we plunge into still deeper darkness. And then sooner, or later the moon’s movement begins to unveil the face of the sun; the faintest light breaks through; we hear again the whisper ‘You are my child, my beloved child, and I love you.’  And even as we know the truth of these words and are deeply reassured, we’re muttering in reply ‘You have a strange way of showing it at times!’

Those ancient Scots would have been relieved when the moon regurgitated the sun. But there would always have been an anxiety which became part of folk memory. Would it happen again? And if so, when? And next time, would darkness win?

When bad stuff happens to us, we can find ourselves living in fear of a recurrence. And then we entrust ourselves to the profound and mysterious love of God who will not let us go even in darkness.

And this entrusting frees us to enjoy the light, to enjoy spring mornings, new awakenings, new thoughts, new friendships, new zest; to regard each day, each breath, each moment as a gift from the Father.

Of the course, the moon is tiny in comparison to the vast glories of the sun. The darkness is real, but we believe it is limited, and finite compared with the limitless immensity of God.  One day the sun will swallow up the darkness for ever. The dark robes of the universe will be transformed into dazzling light.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 19th March 2015)