Something to get quiet about

(Thomas Froese Photo)

The Costanzo family, of Dundas, from left, Gigi, 8, Roslyn, Viggo, 13, and Mike, watch the end of the solar eclipse earlier this year.

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(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 7, 2024)

Here’s a fun fact. “The Sound of Silence,” the hit song by Simon and Garfunkel, has turned 60. Its birthday slipped by somewhat silently (naturally) several weeks ago.

It’s a reminder about the importance of silence, how we need it like we need food. Or air.

Now silence is something that you may not know if you have young kids, or if you’re otherwise struggling in our discontented times, one voice or another screaming for your attention.

But in the category of 2024’s Story of the Year, my vote goes to the solar eclipse, an event that got you and me and millions to look up, to take notice. Then. We. Got. Silent. Together.

Imagine.

Seen across a swath of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, this 2024 eclipse unfolded on April 8^th. That’s more than 5,000 years, according to NASA, after humans first likely recorded an eclipse with rock carvings found in what’s now Ireland.

Now we easily take photos. A favourite of mine is of a local family huddled on their front porch, protective glasses on, watching the sky while eclipse shadows fade.

For a collective moment we actually shut our mouths and opened our eyes. It wasn’t the nativity scene in the carol “Silent Night,” but a sort of Silent Day. Even the animals got quiet. Maybe a car passed you, headlights on in mid-afternoon. Then we all looked up, together, at something larger than ourselves. It was eerily silent. Day became night. It’s no small deal.

These celestial events remind us that we’re connected as a larger human family. They remind us we’re vulnerable, even in our sophisticated and artificially-intelligent times, to mysterious forces.

And Advent – tomorrow is the second Sunday of Advent – is an especially apt time to think of it. Because Advent, a season of waiting, is also a time of reflecting on light and darkness.

Into this comes Jesus, the rabbi-teacher from ancient Israel, especially known for his passion to love and heal people who weren’t particularly easy to love. He’d see them fully, in all their ways, and then love them, regardless. In this, the iconoclastic provocateur turned lives, then history, upside down. This is Christ. “I am the light of the world. Come follow me.”

Now seasonal lights dot our neighbourhoods and cities. They pierce the darkness. And maybe the order of earthly things is still being upended in surprising ways.

One illustration I appreciate is Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral.” It’s about a blind man, Robert, who visits a weed-smoking, heavy-drinking, hard-living character, the story’s unnamed narrator, a man who’s disconnected from community and life and himself.

Ironically, it’s Robert, the blind man with a long Gandalf-like beard, who sees life more clearly. So he helps “Bub,” his host, the narrator, see his own need, and, in this, helps him find a measure of peace and freedom. This, after the two men draw close, and after they, strangely, hand-on-hand, literally draw a cathedral, together.

Not that Carver cared for religion. He didn’t. But he cared for healing. And good writers leave room for mystery, the sort of mystery found in cathedrals, those old stone edifices built masterfully with care and patience, sometimes over generations, with the hope that they’d eventually capture even an echo of heaven.

You’ve heard of the recent restoration of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral?

Even so – and here’s the funny truth of it – the real house, the actual place God wants to live, isn’t in any majestic stone building. It’s, surprise, in you. And in me. In our fleshiest innermost being, our most vulnerable, even dark, places. This is what Jesus claimed about God’s lasting home, where, like in a sort of eclipse of the heart, the light will overcome the darkness.

It’s something to think about. It’s really something. It’s something to get quiet about. Wherever you are. Because it seems to me that this is not the story of the year. It’s the story of any year.