I just watched a total solar eclipse. It was pretty cool. It was weird watching the sky get gradually darker in the middle of the afternoon. With the fancy eclipse glasses I got, I could just barely see a sliver of the sun - the film was dark enough to keep out any other light. It was completely dark for about nine minutes here, and it was strange, like a twilight on a different planet or something.

Solar eclipses, like every other natural phenomenon, are of course thoroughly Catholic. We understand that God arranged the heavens, the earth, and the workings of atoms, nuclear forces, gravity, etc, so that we might see marvels such as these and recognize our Creator in the wonders of creation. The fact that we an calculate and predict these events with such precision is a testament to his order and beauty.

These things fit into salvation history, too. The Gospels record that there was an eclipse just as Jesus died on the cross, almost two thousand years ago. This means that, when God lined everything up at the beginning of time, He arranged it so that the moon would be between the earth and the sun at the moment He Himself would die. His desire to save us from sin and death are written into the fabric of space, as a result. The orbit of the earth and the moon point to his greatness and mercy.

This connects to a thought I had last week about Jesus' descent into hell. The fact that God went to hell has always stood out to me - the line “He descended into hell” in the Apostle's Creed is the origin story for our band's whole aesthetic. In the same way that all of creation was set up so that the moon would block the sun at the moment Jesus died, hell was established with the plan of Jesus going there. At the moment of Adam and Eve's sin, when humanity was separated from God and hell was opened, Jesus planned to go there and conquer eternal death by his death.