I Drove Cross-Country In Search Of Proof Of The Divine. I Found It In The Place I Least Expected.

It was August 2017, and I was on my way from North Carolina to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, where in a couple of days Id witness my first total solar eclipse. Eight months earlier Id set out on a pilgrimage with my two dogs, running away from home to live and travel in a 19-foot van in search of evidence of the Divine in a world where that seemed less and less likely.

After 14 years as a pastor, my faith had faltered, and during the next seven years working at a domestic violence and rape crisis center, it had given way altogether. Yet I missed the sense of presence that had sustained me through so many devastating losses, including the death of a sister and my infant son.

My solo cross-country journey had been deeply meaningful in many ways. I met an 86-year-old man walking 1,200 miles to raise money for cancer research and a former cop-turned-Buddhist who spoke of challenges in choosing nonviolence. In a quiet chapel on a Sedona hillside, my eyes pooled with tears as I listened to the murmur of prayers from broken and hopeful people. During the frequently lonely times, when my two dogs company wasnt enough, there were the friends who were at the other end of the phone, cheering me on with support and encouragement and love. 

But as I neared the end of my journey, I was still looking for that big moment of revelation, when I hoped to see unmistakable evidence of the Divine.

Id reserved a spot in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the point of greatest eclipse or, according to NASA, where the axis of the moons shadow passes closest to the center of the earth. In honor of that, Hopkinsville had officially changed its name to Eclipseville for the duration of the event. Vendors sold Mars and Milky Way candy bars, Moon Pies, Sunchips, Sunkist and, of course, Eclipse chewing gum. 

When I arrived, I discovered my campsite was one of the hundred or more 15 x 10 squares chalked on top of the lush carpet of green grass covering the municipal soccer fields. My little two-person tent was dwarfed by large pavilion-like affairs on either side. Someone had an oldies station blaring through their speakers, and the air filled with smells of grilling food. I listened to voices and laughter as the night turned to velvet and eventually fell into a deep sleep. I woke just after 6 a.m. to the aroma of somebodys coffee. 

Over the next two days, the gathered crowd became a neighborhood. In a large area lined with picnic tables, people played cards and board games, cooked hot dogs over small tabletop grills, and strolled around, stopping to visit with others in the way you might linger on a friends front porch. I met a family from the Netherlands and a guy from Australia who was with his best friend whod flown from Switzerland to see the celestial event. There were people from all the surrounding states and as far away as Louisiana and Colorado and California, and there we all were, ready to stand in a hot field on a muggy day and have our minds blown, one incremental movement of moon-shadow at a time. 

The morning of the eclipse, I woke at 5:15. Through the tents mesh window, I could see reporters setting up to broadcast. A pretty young woman powdered her nose and waited for her cue. Around the fields, dozens of people were setting up large telescopes and cameras with impossibly massive zoom lenses. 

At 10:30 a.m., the NASA gang arrived from Johnson Space Center, and we cheered them like they were rock stars. One of them set up a table and began assembling a PA system, another handed out bookmarks with information about the eclipse, then opened a big box overflowing with eclipse glasses.

Ive read that ancient people created their own explanations for eclipses. Vikings thought wolves ate the sun and the moon. In Korea, it was imagined fire dogs were trying to steal the orbs from the heavens. Navajo tradition told a story in which the eclipse was the out-of-balance cosmic order righting itself. An African myth held that the sun and the moon were embattled, and the eclipse was the work of reconciliation.

And me, I was there hoping for some kind of revelation that could address my doubt and assuage my grief.

Just after 11:00 a.m., the moon began moving over the face of the sun. Some people donned eclipse glasses and stepped out of the pavilion to watch.

From my seat inside the pavilion, I gazed around. Women sprawled on blankets in the grass and men knelt on the ground, peering up at the sun. Children wiggled beside their parent and fiddled with their glasses. A long line of photographers flanked one of the soccer fields, probably 50 or more of them with tens of thousands of dollars worth of fancy equipment. 

At one edge of the pavilion, two couples reclined in expensive camping chairs, eclipse glasses covering their eyes, their faces upturned as they chattered and pointed at the sky, and in an instant, I was stabbed with tenderness. They looked like small children, overcome with amazement. I loved them the man with the coarse cinnamon-colored hair and his slender wife with her small mouth opening and closing, and the other man with the gleaming forehead and beside him his wife with her hand to her cheek. 

I loved the cranky man who glared at everyone as he stood protectively by his polished camera with its lens the size of a Buick. I loved the tired, whiny kids and the sweaty, impatient vendor who just wanted it to be over. I loved the cops strolling back and forth with their hands resting on their stiff leather belts. 

I loved the couple playing Scrabble and the dad frying eggs over a small propane stove in a quiet corner. I loved the homeschooling mom and her excited daughters with their shell-pink skin. 

I loved them all, and I loved myself in the midst of it. I loved myself in the sea of congregated humans, in this blink-of-an-eye slipstream of our fragile, finite, wondrous story. All those miles and all those months, searching high and low for illumination, when all along the truth had been right there, around, within, and with me sparks of the Divine in every person Id encountered. 

One of the NASA guys announced, About seven minutes! and a murmur rippled through the crowds. I walked out into the weird half-light where shadows echoed themselves, and color thinned and flattened. The skin on my hand faded to pale silver and the grass turned a strange aqua blue.

When the announcement came Two minutes to totality! I lay down in the grass to watch as the bright curved sliver of sun grew smaller and smaller. 

Then the air suddenly cooled and an enormous roar went up. Someone set off firecrackers. I took off my glasses and gaped at the black disk where the sun used to be. The cicadas cranked up their singing. The planets switched on Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn and stars appeared Sirius, Arcturus, Capella and Regulus lights that were there all the time, even when I couldnt see them, light that kept shining eons after the stars had burned out. 

I sat up and spread my hands out wide. People kept shouting and clapping and hollering, and I shouted too, feeling in that moment part of something marvelous and vast, like the sense I had of stepping into another realm when, years ago, Id worshipped at an A.M.E. Church, and in the middle of the service, three magnificent women stood up and began speaking in tongues. 

Totality lasted for two minutes and 40 seconds. Then it was as if someone had opened the door to a blast furnace, and I hurried to put on my glasses again.

Within the hour, the fields were clearing out. People hugged goodbye, helped each other tote sleeping bags and rolled-up tents out to cars and SUVs and trucks. The gathered community dispersed. 

I stood for a while in the middle of the empty fields, listening to the hum of retreating car engines, thinking how Id almost missed the real magic being part of the human family in all our frailty, with our sorrows and our joys, our pettiness and how we fail each other, yet how beautifully we still shine.

Rebecca Gummeres writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, the Daily Beast, the NYT and elsewhere. Shes currently looking for a home for her memoir, Chasing Light: One Van, Two Dogs, And An Ex-Pastors Search For The Divine. Rebecca divides her time between North Carolinas mountains and coast. More at www.rebeccagummere.com  and on social media @rgummere.

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