Doomsday?

Laundry Drying

We hung the laundry out before the eclipse began.

Our view in S. California was of the sun about 2/3rds covered.

The last one I saw was when we were on Fire Island off the south shore of Long Island, NY. That was total. 2017?

My first taste of whatever it is that leads some of us to anticipate doomsday. I didn’t expect the world to end, which, I suppose, is akin to trying to imagine what it will be like to be dead.

But it was spooky. A reminder of how small, vulnerable, dependent we are. On forces we can’t control and about which we have only marginal understanding.

Then we were with a bunch of beach friends who made jokes about how weird it seemed. I was the summer pastor of the small church, so you can imagine what fun they had with how they imagined the event tucked into the unfathomable mysteries they were wearied of me pointing to as evidence of there being more we don’t know that what we do.

The eclipse gave me the day off. The sun, our birth mother, made the point more eloquently than any sermon I will ever preach.

Even with only 1/3rd still uncovered in this eclipse, S. California sun was still strong.

But the shadows were weird, not as they should be at 11am.

And the laundry, that would normally be fully dry by then, wasn’t.

I suppose being 83 has something to do with these spooky moments seeming more welcoming than threatening. Maybe the end of the world is closer than we think, but the smart money says my end is a lot closer. The closer it gets, the more I embrace evidence of unfathomable mystery.

I’ve spent my entire adult life, proclaiming what I hope and am in search of: Love being the primal energy that shapes the universe and our lives.

What sort of love? Not so much the sentimental love, nor even the emotional feeling.

But the bedrock energy that binds everything together. That binds me to you, even when I’d like to be free of you. In truth, my best interests are bound up with our connection.

Love holds things together, in forms and ways that seem not only unlikely to us, but that endures in the face of doubt, despair, even death.

Doomsdayers give voice to our knowing we don’t deserve this love. As we often do when we violate that love, they seem to want to get on with what they assume is God’s vengeance, anger at our infidelity.

But what if the decision of our worthiness isn’t decided by the ways in which we have been unfaithful to the love that brought us here and binds us together?

What if that was decided when you and I were called into being from nearly nothing? The fact that we are, instead of aren’t, tells the verdict about us.

If you find this hard to believe, too good to be true, how about if I tell you the laundry is dry? Dried by energy that, because I did nothing to call it into being, nor can imagine it going to all the bother to spend some of itself on such a trivial matter, amazes me.