I saw (and heard and felt) about 90 seconds of Totality yesterday.
On Eclipse Day, I experienced elevated heart rate, increased respiration, and noticeable perspiration. Of course, that was earlier in the day, at the gym. The actual event and my 90 seconds of Totality had little physiological effect. It got pleasantly cooler for ten minutes on each side of Totality, which was nice. A rooster crowed and evening insects appeared for a few minutes. I saw orange flares around the edge of the blocked-out solar disk.
Some people find being there for Totality, a few minutes of complete solar eclipse, to be a deeply moving experience. Some may travel hundreds or thousands of miles to repeat the experience. Others (I’m in this camp) don’t get any sort of spiritual or emotional payoff. Which camp are you in? No judgment either way. It’s just interesting how people’s subjective experience of the event can vary so dramatically.
Two quick comments. First, religious leaders have, historically, described such striking natural events, often accompanied by catastrophe and human suffering (tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes), as divine punishment for disobedience. So (predictably) you backsliding people need to go to church, pray fervently, and fill the offering box! LDS leaders largely avoid this, at least publicly — who knows what they believe in their heart of hearts. But not always. Go read my earlier post God and Comets to read some quotes from Pres. Oaks. Such as: “The Lord uses adversities to send messages to his children.” (And you can guess what the message would be.)
The other relates to the differing subjective experience that people have to an objective event. It carries over to religious experience as well. Some might find a particular LDS meeting very moving, others feel nothing. Some might find participating in LDS temple activities deeply fulfilling or spiritually elevating, others not so much or not at all. Are you a feels-a-lot person or a not-so-much person when it comes to religious activities?
So what do you think?
- Did you experience Totality yesterday? If so, did you find it moving and meaningful, or just an event like any other?
- Do you agree with Pres. Oaks that God sends messages through earthquakes, hurricanes and the like?
- Or do you agree with Pres. Hinckley that such events are just the natural operation of the cosmos and the natural world? I’m a Hinckley man, myself.
- How about religious experience? Where do you fall on the emotional response spectrum? Or, as some might describe it, on the “ability to feel the Holy Ghost” spectrum?
Wheat & Tares 
I am with Hinkley. The rain falls on the just and the unjust. In other words this world provides everyone with both blessings and trials that can be blessings. God isn’t sitting there with their puppet strings planning to punish or reward me. Eclipses are just part of the natural world caused by the rotation of the earth and moon. I did see a bit of a partial yesterday. It’s interesting to see but not particularly spiritual for me.
I don’t get all weepy at church or in the temple. I feel the spirit most of all outdoors when walking or working in the garden. I look up at the mountains and clouds and beautiful sky with awe and gratitude to the Divine.
Politicians and religious leaders attempt to hijack natural disasters for their own advantage. They are the last people I look to in order to understand these events. Pat Robertson…Margarie Taylor Green…Russel Nelson…no thanks.
We were in the path of totality and it was a pretty big deal in the area, school cancelled, many businesses closed, etc. However, despite all the anticipation it was very cloudy. As the big moment arrived we were stunned the way the gray skies darkened to near blackness. It was a very cool experience. Spiritual, nope. But in awe of nature, for sure. I do believe in the workings of the spirit but I’m a Hinckley man. I feel the word revelation is used way too freely to the point that at times in cheapens what it really is. I’ve seen some very bad decisions both individual and institutional blamed on “revelation”. It reminds me of one of the senior brethren training the 70 when he said, “Revelation is not a cheap experience.” Too often leaders, local and general, use the language of revelation that absolves them of personal responsibility when they have made a bad decision. Seems pretty fickle to me that some would embrace “I’m a Mormon” then within a decade see it as the “work of Satan.” Come on that just ain’t right.
We drove up from the Houston area to Dallas to be in the totality. I was a fascinating and unique experience but I wouldn’t call it life changing or miraculous. People love to see signs in the benign. It makes the world feel miraculously in ways we haven’t felt since we were all kids.
I don’t see any message from God in the eclipse, but when million-dollar houses go sliding down unstable mountainsides during rainstorms, or swanky resorts built on barrier islands are destroyed by hurricanes, then yeah, I’m happy to attribute the obvious message to God if it will get people to listen.
I missed this one – work travel meant I was out of town, but was in the totality path for the last one a few years ago. We went to a friends house and watched the eclipse from their pool. I did not think it would be that big of deal since I had seen both lunar and solar partial eclipses before, but I was wrong.
somehow that the world turned to complete night in an instance seemed so profound. I think about it all the time. I don’t think there is a message about the end of the world or any of the religious ominous signs sometimes associated with eclipses or comets, but it just felt like the world suddenly got bigger and smaller all at once. That we are just a speck on these two celestial bodies dancing in space and at the same time somehow part of somtheimg bigger and important. I don’t have the words.
Went about five hours from home for totality. Partially cloudy skies made it less impressive than in 2017, but quite impressive. I love the wonders of nature, and the fleeting eclipse made it even more precious. I agree with dlcroc58 and Nathan.
The eclipse is, perhaps, one of the best examples of how society’s view of supernatural phenomena has changed as scientific knowledge has increased. Before the solar system and the motion of the planets and moons were understood, the are records of how may society viewed eclipses as supernatural events, often a god or gods expressing their displeasure with mankind. Surely this is how Oaks would have viewed these events had he lived in that time period.
As scientists began to put together the puzzle of the motions of the bodies of the solar system, they were initially met with fierce resistance from established religion (at least in Europe, I am not actually certain how such knowledge was received by other world religons at the time). Again, this is surely how Oaks would have reacted if he were a cardinal in the Catholic Church in those days (I’m uncertain when eclipses were understood to be the moon moving in front of the sun–I’m now referring to the general scientific understanding of the motion of objects in the solar system, including the shift to a heliocentric model of the system from the old geocentric model). It was only when the body of scientific evidence became overwhelming, and probably when enough old religious leaders passed away, that religion finally accepted that the earth moved around the sun. Today, even the most ardent believers of the most orthodox religions (and, I guess this esteemed group would have to include the likes of Oaks and Nelson) accept that eclipses and the motion of heavenly bodies can be explained by science.
While weather isn’t yet fully understood by science, great strides have been made in forecasting the weather. With today’s satellite imagery, we can see tropical storms form and gradually turn into hurricanes weeks before they hit any body of land. Meteorologists are able to predict the formation of such storms and the paths they will take with ever-increasing accuracy. I can’t prove this, and I don’t know if we’ll ever get to this point, but I firmly believe that if enough weather sensors were in place to drive improving weather forecasting models and if enough computational power existed on the earth to run these models, that the problem of weather would be “solved”. That is, just as there is no longer any divine intervention to be found in eclipses or the motion of the planets, sufficiently powerful computers with adequate inputs, would also remove any divine intervention to be found in natural disasters caused by weather. The same goes for volcanoes, earthquakes, and really any such natural phenomenon.
What does this mean for the scriptural stories (or even the modern story of how paying tithing broght famine to southern Utah that was only fixed when the members their started heeding Lorenzo Snow’s call to pay their tithing) where wickedness brought famine or earthquakes, and prophets calling people to repentance bringing heavenly intervention caused rain to fall from the skies again? Where Oaks sees divine intervention in these stories, I believe that these stories were either 1) completely made up to begin with, 2) exaggerated over time to fit the desired narrative that sinning can bring unpleasant consequences from God while repenting can return one into God’s grace again, or 3) just coincidence–the natural phenomen did occur and the timing of the bad weather coinciding with “sin” while the good weather coinciding with “repentance” was purely coincidental (it would have happened whether the “sin” or “repentance” happened at all). With enough data and computing power, I believe that the weather is completely predictable–no divine intervention is required to explain ancient or modern famines or the storms that finally brought relief from such famines.
The Q15 (and I imagine this extends to the other GAs, but I’m uncertain of this) seems to be allergic to calling scientists/engineers to its ranks, at least during my lifetime. Yes, I’m aware that there have been a few (Scott was a scientist/engineer and both Renlund and Nelson are medical doctors), but scientists/engineers sure do seem to be highly unrepresented when compared to the number of lawyers and businessmen. One can only wonder how many blunders the Q15 could have avoided with a few more competent scientists in its ranks to help explain things to the likes of Oaks (or, at least block them since I’m not sure a guy like Oaks would actually accept scientific explanations for things, like, oh, let’s see, homosexuality).
I could see a partial eclipse from my home which backs up to a park and elementary school. The students were mesmerized. Maybe not as much so as during the last eclipse, the annular, which was spectacular where we live- a complete ring of fire- by driving an hour to view. Nevertheless, through a child’s eyes, the fact that a tiny rock in space can orbit in front of a far distant giant flaming ball of gas and cast a shadow over a supposedly nearby rock with a bunch of tiny human creatures evolving on it, is, well, LIT! Yes it is. And that we’ve evolved enough to televise it from different time zones and count down to umbra? Also LIT. No more cowering in our caves. No more widely accepted gloom & doom predictions. No more general panics over dire calls to repentance and to fill the coffers because the End is Near. We are evolving. That is pretty lit. And That has Me mesmerized.
We drove out last year to see the annular eclipse which was cool, but this one was not convenient enough to bother. I do like seeing the high res pictures, though. A guy who served in my mission was spouting off a bunch of kooky conspiracy theories about the end of the world related to this, so that’s fun. I don’t see these events as divine in origin, either gifts or retribution, although since we saw the annular eclipse on native lands, we did read the native traditions related to them (and basically broke all those protocols, so there you have it–they stay indoors and don’t look at it).
Actually, we were just watching an old Star Trek: Next Gen episode last night called The Chase, in which Picard finds a genetic puzzle that leads him (and Romulans, Klingons, and Cardassians) to the original race that created and seeded life throughout the galaxy over 4 billion years ago. I remember at the time finding that episode more theologically compelling than most of what we hear at church. But yeah, I’m definitely more of a Hinckley person.
I don’t see myself as being very religious, but I do find myself inspired by nature, science, human nature, and the like. I appreciate all of that stuff, and feel grounded when I experience it.
I didn’t see the totality because I stayed in Utah but I did see through the clouds a partial eclipse. I also listened to the reporting of the whole passing over the USA on NPR and thought of my family, some who went to Austin, TX, and other who were in Jamestown, NY and how we were all experiencing this at the sameish time. I thought it interesting the may daughter that went to TX because it had the best chance of being clear was totally clouded out. Still she said having the darkness come over them for four minutes and then it get light again was a trip. My mother, brother, and sister stayed in Jamestown where my brother lives. He wanted to go to Dunkirk on Lake Erie but they others talked him out of it. He was not happy but in the end, they saw the totality peek out from the clouds while his friends in Dunkirk didn’t see any of it except the darkness. My mom said “Crow is best eaten warm.”
I also enjoyed listening to NPR radio talk about it in different parts of the country. One person in particular was interesting because she talked about how it proves God’s mysteries while the very next person said it shows the marvels of nature. I guess we see what we want to.
I issue my strongest possible condemnation to the idea that God causes every specific problem in the world simply to punish someone. That is the lazy man’s view of theology.
For the lazy man doesn’t want the blame for failing to adequately prepare for natural disasters. The lazy man prefers to blame God by claiming that the natural disaster was really unforeseeable and thus, there was no way to prepare.
The truth is that natural disasters just happen. They impact both the hardworking and the lazy. The difference in outcome is that the hard working will stock away supplies for the bad times. The lazy will sit around in sweatpants and crocs blasting Dua Lipa at full volume, and will blame God when caught unprepared.
I drove 5 hours each way yesterday to Dallas to see it. Somehow the 4 minutes justify the 10 hours. It’s that amazing. I traveled even further in 2017 and I would do it again. Having also seen last year’s annular eclipse, the difference between 99% and 100% is vast. Totality is worth experiencing. It wasn’t especially emotional or spiritual for me. Mostly I feel lucky. I’m lucky to live in a time when we understand this rare and unique event, when the time and place of its occurrence can be predicted down to the minute and second years in advance, when I personally have the ability to put myself in its path and experience it. And yesterday I was especially lucky to be in a part of Texas with fewer clouds than other parts.
In terms of religious experience, I’m not especially prone to emotional or religious experiences. For a long time I thought myself spiritually deficient. Now I think I’m just wired that way and it’s OK. Paul thinks the body of Christ needs all of us. I’d like my church to take that idea more seriously.
Natural wonders, eclipses, sunsets, even windstorms and blizzards do move me. Some make me feel as if I am the part of some giant purposeful plan, important, but small and humble. Stargazing moves me. Music (variety of genres) moves me. Song birds move me. Learning moves me. The smell of hyacinths moves me. Religious concepts from a variety of religions move me. My grandchild’s laughter moves me. My wife’s smile, the dancing of morning light on a local pond, the warm spring breeze on my balding head all move me. It seems like God loves me with every breath I take. I could not strictly define these as solely religious, because these feelings rarely happen at church. If there is a place where I “feel the Spirit” the least, it is church meetings. For some reason, I frequently feel empty, at times even like I am on the threshold of oblivion there. So many times I escape to the safety of the parking lot, hoping for some children at play, a bird singing, the wind playing with clouds, anything to remind me that I live in a universe of … well, love. I center myself in the sunshine. Only then can I trudge back into Elders’ Quorum, fortified by Sol Invictus and visions of wildflowers to wait out the meeting with hope that one day the sacred I see practically everywhere and in every person throughout the week also comes to meeting with us.
Took the train to Hamilton Ontario to experience 90 seconds of totality. I had previously seen a lunar eclipse as well as an 80% partial solar eclipse. This was something entirely different. The sky was completely overcast and then cleared just in time. Hundreds of people were cheering on the sun like we were at a sporting event. We ended up with a crystal clear view.
And totality – I have no words. You’re looking at the corona of the sun with your naked eyes. It was one of the coolest things I have ever seen in my life. Pictures don’t do it justice. I understand now why people chase eclipses all around the world or why ancient peoples who didn’t understand the science would be freaked out.
As far as the LDS angle goes, if you believe in the heartland theory of the Book of Mormon this eclipse cut right through all the Nephite lands. I don’t know if that means anything or not but I’m not going to dismiss it either.
I believe in a hyper-immanent god that is synonymous with nature. I do not believe in a supernatural transcendent god who lives in some remote space but who is regularly intervening, almost randomly in many cases, in human affairs, even in the most trivial of individual circumstances and daily minutiae. People ask where is god. My response is in front of you and all around you. It is the very air you breathe, smells you smell, and sights you see. To survive and thrive is to understand nature itself, not some abstract unconcrete supernatural which apparently only a select few gurus, such as the Q15, around the world understand. Earthquakes hurt people because humans are and have been ill-prepared to deal with them. Earthquakes are part of nature. It is how the earth has shaped its landscape. As we have been able to understand earthquakes more, we have been able to prevent harm from them. That is what the church is doing in temple square right now. Earthquake-proofing the area, right?
I agree with both Hinckley and Oaks. On the one hand a quick view though a modern telescope ought to be enough to humble us to the dust–even without any theological framing. But on the other hand, the idea that the cosmic dust moveth hither and thither at the command of an all loving and intelligent being is irresistible to me.
Re: The Eclipse: I’ve never seen totality–though I hear that it can be a rather sobering–even solemn–experience. Even so, it’s difficult for me *not* to see the hand of the Creator in the apparent sizes of the sun and moon. The fact that the diameter of sun is 400 times larger than the diameter of moon and yet 400 times farther away is an astonishing coincidence when we consider how perfectly positioned the moon is vis-a-vis its enabling and sustaining effect on the earth with respect to life–especially of the human variety.
Jack, what would be the purpose of a “Creator” to create a moon the size and distance it is so that once every couple of years some place in the world gets a few minutes of totality? Columbus used his knowledge of an upcoming eclipse to trick the native Jamaicans into giving his men food. He told them his God was angry and would take away the sun if they did not feed them. I can’t think of anything good from a “Creator” POV that an eclipse brings. Sure it is cool,a dn brings some people to tears, but in the overall plan of things, what is the use?
Bishop Bill,
Does everything need a purpose? What about beauty or joy? Are they measurable or quantifiable? Still no one would want to live in a world without them. The scriptures tell us the heavens declare the glory of God. I personally am grateful He took the trouble to beautify the universe rather than focus purely on functionality.
One of my issues with Pres Nelson is that under his leadership we’ve lost some of those unquantifiable things. Examples: the gutting of the Salt Lake Temple, the cancelling of church pageants, even the tearing down of the Fine Arts Center at BYU. I suppose the trade off was having someone with a medical background at the helm during a pandemic. Not everyone can be good at everything.
As for Columbus, that was on him, not God.
Bishop Bill:
“Jack, what would be the purpose of a “Creator” to create a moon the size and distance it is so that once every couple of years some place in the world gets a few minutes of totality?”
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. The fact that the moon can eclipse the sun within such tight parameters is only a side effect of a truly amazing coincidence: that their respective disks happen to be the same apparent size. Of course, I must concede the possibility that such a phenomenon is pure coincidence. Even so, when I consider the scriptural allusions involving the sun, moon, and stars I can’t help but see a theological corollary.
We chased totality. I went into the 2017 eclipse not expecting much since I didn’t think totality we could be much different than a partial eclipse and came away blown away and wanting more. Nashville was only going to get partiality, so drove up to Indiana to get 3.5 minutes of totality in clear skies. To me it was well worth it. I find natural wonders wonderful.
The truth is natural disaster do not just happen. The world has just had the ten hottest months on record, and 2023 was the hottest year on record.
Climate scientists are concerned that it is worse than they expected. If the Northern hemisphere is hot this summer, and the months continue to be hotter we are in strife. We need to do all we can to stop the planet heating, and then reverse it.
The great barrier reef is being bleached by the water temperature being too high. They have bleached the last 3 years. They die if it keeps up. Is that a disaster if the largest reef on the planet dies?
Much of Australia is flooded at present caused by climate change. Is that a natural disaster that just happened?
If the Northern hemisphere has a hot summer it will indicate that global warming has passed a turning point. If months and years continue to be the hottest on record, we need the world to unite to stop it.
The world will not survive 4 more years of Trump climate denial. Natural disaster just happening, it will be caused by conservatives not acting to prevent it.
Agree, Geoff, that we need to get climate change under control, because according to a “The View” (a women’s morning weekday talk show in the US) co-host the eclipse, a recent New Jersey earthquake (felt in New York City), and the regular 17-year cycle of the cicada breeding season are caused by climate change! Scary! 🙂 Actually, yes, things are happening, and some but not all are man-caused, but I don’t blame Trump for all the world’s ills. I think that global warming is, in large part, a natural trend, like the eclipse, but I think that pollution can increase the harmful effect and we can do things that will help. I don’t think that eliminating carbon output will restore us to a paradisiacal state, nor will it cure all that ails us!
We went to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in a fuel-burning car, to be pretty much right in the center of the totality, and it was spectacular, amazing, moving, and beautiful. Yes, it was predicted years in advance and is a naturally occurring phenomenon, but I am willing and able to see God’s hands in it, as in all creation. Others don’t see God’s work and that is fine. The Lord makes his rain to fall on all of us, and there may be no message or meaning most of the time. I cannot say dogmatically that the 8 April 2024 eclipse is a statement from God with a specific meaning, but I do think that someone could honestly say that he sees God’s handiwork in it. I respect that.
I totally dropped the ball on this eclipse, which is odd for a space enthusiast like me. My thoughts and emotions have been elsewhere lately. All I had to do to enjoy 90% of totality was step out on my porch, which I did, but without having bothered to get proper glasses. So it happened above me without me daring to look at it. I admit to growing jealous when I saw pictures online from friends who both got glasses and drove the hour or so south to watch totality.
It was neat to watch as the community around me grew dim, but not with the usually reddened sunset colors. Also, watching human life around me pause for a couple of minutes in the middle of the day, with people coming out of businesses to don 3D-like glasses and stare up. Again, kinda neat.
In college, I got into driving out into the Utah countryside to watch meteor showers. Saw some beauties. There is precedent going back to Joseph Smith for Mormonism and astronomy to be bedfellows. Joseph and others played up the apocalyptic ambiance of the 1833 Leonid meteor shower, which may have been an all-out meteor storm. Literally a sky covered with continuous shooting stars coming with the frequency and coverage of a good fireworks show
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/12/13/leonid-meteor-shower-judgment-day/
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-from-edward-partridge-between-14-and-19-november-1833/1