On Monday many of us throughout the U.S. experienced a partial or total solar eclipse. For between three and four minutes, a spring afternoon was shrouded in darkness as the moon directly covered our direct vision of the sun. Our cities and countrysides slowly transformed from afternoon, to twilight, to evening. Everyone looked up together and watched in awe as darkness fell across the land.

After these moments in darkness, slowly the moon began to pass over the sun, again bathing the world in sunlight. There was no denying the beauty of the emerging light. But for me, that transformation, the shift from dismal night to the radiant day, was a bit jarring. The return of the light was so bright, so surprising, that I was almost taken aback. Strangely, in those few minutes, I had gotten used to the dark.

And I don’t think this is an event reserved for an eclipse.

If you’ve been living in darkness…or sadness…or despair for a while, sometimes the return to the light can feel a bit too bright. The light can be too much at first. Maybe we got used to the darkness and thought it was inevitable. Maybe we’d given up hope that the light could return. Maybe it's overwhelming, like opening the curtains to the rising sun after we’ve been asleep for hours. Light can be jarring when we’ve conceded to darkness.

On Monday, after three minutes, when the moon slowly began to glide past the face of the sun, none of us were able to look directly at its glow. We had to put our protective glasses back on, knowing that the light was too radiant to embrace without that tool.

The eclipse showed us that there are tools that can help us to adjust to the light. I would posit that is what our faith is: a tool that helps us adjust to– and become bathed in– the light. Without our faith, without our ritual, we wouldn’t be able to make sense of the light of the Easter season. The shift from death to life would be too jarring, too unbelievable, too hard to see. But, with the faith that comes from Easter hope, the mystery of it all becomes just a little bit clearer. And, standing side by side with our community surrounding us, we are able to look directly at the Son and let the Light in.

Happy Eclipse Week, and Happy Easter.

On Monday, April 8, 2024, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith released a declaration on human dignity entitled Dignitas Infinita (Infinity Dignity). Meant to affirm the inherent and inalienable dignity of each human person and defend their rights and freedoms, the declaration tragically fails the LGBTQ+ community – particularly transgender, nonbinary, and other gender diverse people – by clinging to long-outdated and harmful ideas of gender essentialism that particularly dismiss their lived experiences.

There is a lot at stake for women and for the Church as a whole in the choice of scripture passages we proclaim on Sundays. The ways in which we understand and know God are formed within the liturgy. What we pray and sing, as well as the stories we re-tell in public worship form and shape what we believe about God, ourselves, and our relationship to God and to one another.

Many Catholics do not realize that important stories of our foremothers in faith are excluded from or diminished in our lectionary. Catholics are deprived of learning about the gifts, grace, courage, leadership and ministry of women like Mary Magdalene, Phoebe, Junia, and Shiprah and Puah. Lifting up and telling the stories these faithful women will help Synod participants and all Catholics understand that women were and, should now be, leaders and ministers in our Church.

As we head towards the 2024 Synod, help us spread the word that women’s history is Salvation History and should be included in our lectionary!