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The Path of Totality
by David G. Duggan ©
www.virtueonline.org
April 9, 2024
I was in college in March 1970 when Warren Beatty flew his Lear Jet up to Nova Scotia to see a total eclipse of the sun. Immortalized in Carly Simon's hit song "You're So Vain," the event caused a minor disruption to the studies, sports events, and anti-war protests at the New England college I was attending. One of the fraternities, later immortalized in the movie "Animal House," hosted a druid-themed celebration from its balcony. A Merlin-robed frat boy came out and intoned some chant while the crowd below cheered. Nothing like a celestial event to take your mind off of eating goldfish, packing into a Volkswagen, or trying to end the war in Vietnam.
Fifty-four years but only two other total eclipses (1979 and 2017) have elapsed since that dawning of the age of Aquarius yet we have endured Y2K, 12 presidents, and the burst of the Internet. I have aged and greyed, fathered a son and lost my parents. I have found Christ in the most unlikely places: a church basement, a repaired relationship, a sunset over a lake. World population has more than doubled, while the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has by some measures declined 80 percent. We may not be any closer to the millennium, but it may be less far away.
Some astronomers link Jesus' birth heralded by the "star in the East" (Matt. 2:2) to a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter; others to a comet. Skyward signs and portents were ancient predictors of earthly outcomes and the second millennium of Christ's crucifixion, resurrection and ascension is only a few years away.
Anybody buying long-term Treasuries?
David Duggan is a retired attorney living in Chicago
