Sungods

In many ways and at many times throughout history, human beings have worshiped the sun as a god. Really there is nothing more natural for humans, a fact you’ve easily noted if you’ve ever stood in the warm sunlight on a crisp fall day and felt the perfect symmetry of the moment – the hot, bright light beamed from unknowable distances, the crisp chill air hovering against your mammalian-warm skin, the way that time stops when you close your eyes against the sunlight and bask in its ubiquitous brilliance.

Sun worship is about as human a pastime as you can imagine. And why not? The sun brings the new day: new promise, warmth, the beginning of they cycle of life once more. The sun makes things grow, which is the promise of life. The sun has a rhythm that we can predict, and predictability is the definition of human security. And the sun is mysterious. What is it? Where is it? How can it be everywhere and also just right there – way up high and white hot bright, so shiny and intense that it’s impossible to look at, impossible to simply and directly see?

The default view of the divinity of the sun is wonderful in so many ways. The beauty of the sun is that it connects every living thing on earth together. No one above ground avoids the sun’s presence, and the connection among humans is strongest. The sun’s presence in our lives is the great universal, the unifying theme of human experience. It transcends time and place and culture and, except for the tricky nature of idolatry in some instances, even religion.

The sun’s resemblance to a godhead is fascinating. In the Christian and Jewish traditions, God is an omnipresent and omnipotent deity whose judgment none can avoid. Like the sun: everywhere, all powerful, equally applicable. The sun doesn’t care where you live or what you believe, it will burn you if you spend too much time exposed. The sun is coming for you…or is it? The sun is simply doing what it does when it washes the world in light and heat and UV rays, when it punches up the chlorophyll of greenery, when it burnishes our melanin. Like God, the sun acts according to its nature; naturally it’s hot and bright and so massive that the planets in our solar system are irresistibly drawn around it in an eternal and mysterious dance. Theology should be so beautiful.

What I love about the sun that can be hard to love about the gods of human theology is its unassuming criticality to life. Without the sun there is no life, yet it doesn’t need prophets and profiteering preachers to sing its praises to elucidate that reality. The sun is literally at the center of human life, a fact that is central to human understanding, that can’t be denied. It’s worth worshiping because its existence is complimentary to our own.

We could just as easily curse the sun for sunburns, droughts, desertification and death. It would be simple to blame the sun for the perils of winter, bemoaning its relative absence for causing frostbite, sickness, and dark dreary peril. Surely we could build a theology of spite and anger around this great bright force that seems to control our days and seasons, this inescapable light that fills every exposed crevice with gold, only to slink away in the evening and allow the darkness to drench the world again, for a time, for a season. What is this godlike orb that it has such pull on our very existence?

If we fail to see the divine nature in everything that is, we’re left instead with the void of the divine all around us. The sun is an easy candidate for divinity, but why not all of creation as well? Let the sun be a god, and its light be divinity shared with the world. Let the grass then also be gods, and the trees, and the birds in them. Let the rocks by so divine that they cry out their own names, the name of the God who has made all things and inhabits all things and is, even now, making and remaking all things. As a flower goes to seed and seed becomes another flower still. Let that be divine. Let it be the same God that hangs in the sky each day, promising renewal, warmth, danger, mystery, and moments of perfection.