By Peter D. VanderBloomer

I went to the courtyard outside Sterling Memorial Library on a cold morning back in November because the Astronomy Club had set up a solar telescope — filtered in such a way that one can gaze safely upon the sun. 

My ever charming and charismatic Gujarati-Kenyan-British-South African housemate had put it on my radar, and I, long enthralled by celestial objects, thought it was high time I finally took a look at that flaming center of our solar system. Of course, I’d seen photos of it before. I knew there was a lot more to it than the textureless orange disc one can sometimes glimpse at sunset. But I wasn’t entirely sure what I was in for when I stepped up to the telescope with two friendly and awkward astrophysics undergrads as my celestial stewards — inviting me to peer in. 

I squinted one eye and lowered the other to the glass, but some clouds lay between the sun and me. Their white wisps tore across the eyepiece and I struggled to discern what I was seeing. It made me dizzy, and so I stepped back from the scope to await their passing. But soon enough, I felt the heat of the sun flare back up and warm my bundled-up body. My undergrad celestial stewards enthusiastically encouraged me to look back into the scope now that the clouds had parted. 

Solar telescopes, like a sunset, filter out most visible light except for the longer, red wavelengths. So, I looked in and saw our sun — its white light stripped of all its shades save the crimson — and its raw structure lay naked before my eye with all its surface details unveiled.

What I saw was a spherical boiling, a spinning droplet of God, a blinding virus, an orgy of elements, and perhaps the paragon of light and form that the planets all reflect but fail to mimic. Surface turbulence, solar prominences, protruding fibers, coiling ropes of hydrogen fire, squirming orifices casting spells of flung flames licking the void of space: our star is perfect. 

What a strange curse that we need this special technology to see it. As Earthlings, we have evolved a sensitive retina, perfectly attuned to the dim, reflected light that the sun throws upon our world, but far too sensitive to attend to the source itself. Our Earthly colors are the sun’s distant after-thought, and on that November day I had the chance to witness the miracle of light’s first incarnation. I saw the blinding process — truly more of a verb than a noun — that feeds our world while carrying us in its gentle orbit.

But what I really saw as I gazed into the telescope was a newborn baby nursing at its mother’s breast. 

What I really saw was an emergent ceiba tree hoisting heavy, leaf-laden branches skyward; a city shimmering, cranes in motion adding floors atop already tall towers; a school of baitfish being gorged upon by yellowfin tuna with the trillion polyps of the reef below it glowing red and pink and green in the dappled waters. 

I saw a group of herdsmen telling jokes while seated in the shade of an acacia; I saw yellowed pages turned slowly by weathered hands. 

What I saw was suburban kids biking down the sidewalk in summertime with sweat on their brows, trying to hold onto both popsicles and handlebars; 

I saw bathers splashing in the surf and a satellite, silent in lonely orbit — saw oil seeping upwards into new geologies. 

I watched ice ages come and go like white waves lapping down from the poles, witnessed the world’s first flower open, and heard the great, primordial fleets of cetaceans filling the ocean with song as they chased the summer solstice northward — 

“Excuse me sir, would you mind letting this other student take a peek?”

I apologized and stumbled away from the telescope stupefied, coming back to my senses slowly, and looked around. Red and yellow leaves rustled in a light breeze, backlit by a cerulean sky. 

… 

I can still see it up there, every time the sun returns to my attention: a thick rope of plasma, sputtering up off the boiling surface, the whole thing writhing, radiant, godlike. Some things simply can’t be unseen once the curtain has been lifted. I’m not going to claim that this revelation outside Sterling Memorial Library instantaneously healed my minor depression, nor that it fully reignited my dampened spirit — that would be an overstatement. But the tone of my days since then has played out with fewer minor chords. A bit of awe was reawakened within me, ever so subtly, while I gazed upon our sun. Simply put, I found something that I had misplaced somewhere along the path. 

As I walked away from the telescope that morning, before the stress of the day crept back in and clouded my vision, I remember having the final thought: 

What definition of God does the sun fail to meet? 

What criteria for the sacred does the sun not surpass? 

   We were once sun worshippers. How on Earth have we lost this most obvious insight?