Hope and Sunrise

[alanajoli]

I wish I had had my camera as we hiked up East Rock in New Haven for the sunrise service this morning. I often comment on asakiyume's blog about how I really enjoy seeing the world through her photographs. This morning, I had the experience of watching the sun rise, first over a hill in the distance, and then over a stretch of clouds that formed a second horizon, and thinking how I felt like the beauty of the world was coming into focus. It's hard to look at the sunrise for any length of time, because it becomes too bright quickly -- the eyes can't handle so much light. And if you twist the metaphor and think of it literally -- thinking of light for what it means rather than the science behind what it is -- it's nice to think that there can be moments when we are faced with so much light that we're dazzled, that our breath is stolen away.

Easter for me is a day of hope -- of the restoration of hope. I always come away from Easter with a feeling like the year is new, things are beginning all over again. It doesn't surprise me that there are so many mythic parallels, and that Easter itself takes place during a spring festival. Tolkien and Lewis talked about the correlation of the spring myths (Robert Graves's "year king" tradition; Osiris's battle through the underworld to come back from the dead), and Tolkien convinced Lewis to think of them as a sort of rehearsal for Christianity, in which the myths became fact. (I've found a description of this conversation most recently in From Achilles to Christ by Louis Markos, which I discovered in a Google search and obviously must read in its entirety.) The emotional content of those stories is certainly a unifying factor: what we believed was dead has returned to life. Hope has returned, and we are reborn. The sun has crested the horizon and filled our world with such brightness that our eyes overflow with it and we must look away.

Comments

[judo100.livejournal.com]

To me, the universe has so much light and energy that we can't grasp it all - or even nearly all - because it overwhelms us. A sunrise like you describe is a good example, and that's only a sunrise, not the whole universe. One aspect of being human is the tension between feeling like a meaningful individual and sudden experiences of the vast divine that can make us feel less than nothing. Reconciling the two is a task worthy of a lifetime...

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Reconciling the two is a task worthy of a lifetime...

And what a joyful path it is to travel. :)