Wednesday, Day 11: Sun

One of my favorite memories is sitting at the top of a mountain in the center of Ikaria after an all-night panigiri (village party) when I went to Greece for the summer in 1998. I watched the sun literally rise out of the ocean, which spread out like a giant cloak of darkness around the island. I watched it inch its way above a rocky, desert coast, across a forest of aromatic pines higher up the mountain, until finally, it enveloped me. I was exposed, the music still playing behind me, the whole world new again, even as the party went on.

It was Sunday morning, I realized, and somewhere, a priest was preparing the Eucharist, and some faithful were undoubtedly heading to the liturgy. I felt the deepest peace of my life enter my stomach, spreading from there up my esophagus, all the way into my throat. 

I felt a deep connectedness to those who were heading to church, as well as to those dancing behind me. I felt a deep connectedness to the significant other I had recently left, who had hurt me deeply, as well as to the friends who waited for my return back home. To my father, whose homeland I was visiting. To my mother, dead almost 15 years. To all those I had lost, and all those I would inevitably lose before my own death.

The sun rises and sets regardless of what is happening in our small corner of the world. The Earth spins on its own orbit and turns around the sun and we aren’t aware of it at all, unless we stop to think about the miracle of gravity that holds us against its surface, no matter where we are.

The Resurrection community was a community of attention. Suddenly nothing made a lot of sense, and, at the same time, everything did. Suddenly there dawned in Jesus’ friends a deep realization that no one was too far away, physically or spiritually, to become family. This Easter season, pay attention to the small miracles you can’t see—the spinning the earth, the orbit of the planets, gravity’s firm hold. Pay attention, too, to the miracles you can see—the sun rising and setting. The slow or sudden progress toward a new season.