reflections on eclipse - 12 august 2026
The heavens declare the glory of God.
Yesterday the moon crossed the sun at twenty degrees of Leo, the sign of personal light, of the sovereign "I," of everything in us that longs to be seen. And for a few minutes somewhere above us, the sun was hidden. Our greatest luminary went dark.
But the darkness of an eclipse is not absence. It is hiddenness. And hiddenness is one of the infinite ways God lives among us.
Think of a forest. We praise the canopy — the high, sunlit crowns, the part that is seen. But no canopy feeds itself. Beneath it, in shade and quiet, lies the understory: the low green, the leaf fall, the root and fungal threads passing sugar and water hand to hand in the dark.
The hidden layer feeds the visible one.
And this, perhaps, is the shape of the contemplative journey: those long seasons when God seems hidden, silent, unreadable, inscrutable — when the light we once navigated by goes dark.
And still we go on.
Not because the way is clear, not because the light returns on our schedule — but because somewhere along the road, our faith has quietly outgrown our understanding, and we have learned to walk by a light that we cannot conceive.