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By Jennifer Graham
A remarkable image circulated on social media showed a narrow strip of America where Airbnbs were fully booked on Sunday. Call it the Miracle Belt — the places where, for a few minutes on Monday, weather permitting, the solar eclipse will be seen in eerie and glorious totality.
It is a miracle, albeit one explained by science.
But that’s not a miracle, literalists might say.
Well, no, not in the most literal sense of the word, not the way that C.S. Lewis described the miraculous: “an interference with Nature by supernatural power.” But there are everyday miracles, too, by which I mean events so extraordinary that they ought to be heralded by trumpets, even though they are part of “ordinary” life. Your conception and birth were two such events, as is the migration of humpback whales and salmon, and the emergence of every single butterfly this spring. It’s hard to imagine now, but as recently as 1983, a PBS special on embryonic development was called “The Miracle of Life.”
Everyday miracles are conduits of awe when we pay attention, and too often we don’t. But it’s hard to ignore a total solar eclipse.
We have come a long way in our understanding of celestial events. Even the Star of Bethlehem has been explained in coldly scientific terms, and some say the darkness that fell over Golgotha when Christ was crucified was a lunar eclipse. In ancient times, when the sun disappeared behind the moon for a few minutes, our ancestors saw calamity in the unexpectedly dark sky. A solar eclipse was, for a few despairing hours, reason to believe that the sun was forever gone, and with it, all light and sustenance.
No one believes that today, even though as 15 states prepared for an influx of eclipse tourists, there were still some peddling predictions of doom. Among the wildest theories of impending apocalypse were those that pointed out that the paths of the 2017 and 2024 solar eclipses form a giant “X” over America and thus should be considered proof that America has been marked by God (or Elon Musk) in some sinister way.
https://www.deseret.com/faith/2024/04/07/solar-eclipse-totality-2024-miracle-faith/