It must have been so scary for our ancestors,
the first time the moon eclipsed the sun.
Did they wonder if the end had come?
Did they think God was punishing them?
Did they brace themselves for perpetual darkness?
After the longest seven minutes they’d known,
the sun peeked out and became herself again.
From that time forward,
we didn’t have to fear an eclipse.
Scientists explained it,
calendars predicted it.
We put on special glasses and marvel.
The first time our ancestors experienced a soular eclipse–
God absent,
total darkness–
not for seven minutes, but for seventy-seven times seven
hours, days, years.
They thought it was true: God had left them alone.
Then, one day,
there was light again,
truth again,
trust again.
Our ancestors told the stories of God hidden but never absent,
passed it down
from generation to generation
wrote it in books, and on their hands and foreheads,
not so it would help us believe the unbelievable in the darkness,
which is impossible,
but so a community can hold our hands,
and believe for us
until the sun returns.
Union with God is not something we acquire by technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God. Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion we are caught up in; it is the human condition.
–Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land
