In this guest post, Gifford Volunteer Chaplain Kathy Rohloff shares her personal reflections on the shared experience of the total solar eclipse, April 8, 2024. Kathy and all of our volunteer chaplains offer a nonsectarian presence. If you need someone to listen, and hear you with compassion, you can reach them by calling the Rev. Tim Eberhardt at 802-728-2107.
By Kathy Rohloff
Weather seems to influence our lives every day.
When planning a vacation, we check the extended forecast for our travel dates. Before planting or pruning, specific times are chosen to reap the desired result. So much depends on weather and soil conditions.
At Christmas, we expect and hope for snow. At Easter, it is strange and unpredictable, and that memory is fresh in our minds from this past Easter.
There is one daily occurrence we depend on and yet take for granted—the rising of the sun. There are gray days and cloudy days, but there is always light that comes to distinguish the day from the night.
And then we experience a total solar eclipse.
On the Saturday before the eclipse there didn’t seem to be a noticeable change in the state. By Sunday, traffic began in earnest and continued until the eclipse began Monday around 2:20 p.m.
Because we received a delivery of a refrigerator around 2:15, our viewing happened at our home. This experience was not as spectacular as that of those closer to total blackout, but we did share it with deliverymen on our driveway. We witnessed the light morphing into a dusk-like quality, the birds and squirrels disappearing, the temperature dropping and … silence.
Our daughters and grands experienced total darkness, cold and silence around 3:36 p.m. They then waited as the light slowly returned.
During that time when the sun faded and then failed to give light during the day, we all experienced something much bigger than ourselves.
There was definitely awe and wonder. Perhaps we realized anew a sense of our dependence on the sun and all that it means to the sustaining of life. We cannot live without it, even though we often take it for granted.
Vermont saw an estimated influx of 160,000 additional folks who were instructed to bring a blanket, plenty of snacks, and chairs, for viewing. And because it is Vermont, they were asked NOT to drive on a backroad.
After they had gotten to experience the eclipse, they assembled into car conga lines and slowly sashayed on home, arriving late but happy after their adventure.
In those hours, we experienced a truly miraculous event that reduced our differences to nil.
All experienced awe, all were filled with wonder and gratitude—and perhaps are now more aware of the great gift that the sun is to all of us. Every day it is dependable.
May we hold onto the wonder and gratefulness; may we not take this gift for granted.
And perhaps we can choose to view each other not by our differences but by those truths revealed in the eclipse.
Our lives are interconnected, we depend on one another, and every life brings light into the world.
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The next total solar eclipse that can be seen from the contiguous United States will be on Aug. 23, 2044. -NASA
