“Let there be light”

It was nearly four o’clock before I crawled into bed Saturday night, and I was still thinking about the final chapters of Jayber Crow (I listened to the whole audiobook in the car), with much gratitude for my bed, Helen asleep on the other side, and the little bundle of Benjamin between us.

I was also still thinking about sunrise eighteen hours earlier in Colorado.

When I travel, I spend a lot of time scheming the best routes and things to see and do along the way. I’d planned to leave at 5:00, but when I woke at 4:15, something occurred to me: I’d be driving along the Black Canyon about forty-five minutes later, and it might be worth seeing at sunrise. So I delayed departure an hour to time that part of the drive with the rising sun.

In my opinion, the Black Canyon is one of the more underrated natural wonders of North America - a narrow chasm cleaved 2,700 feet into the heart of the earth, its granite faces nearly vertical. Walking to the edge and looking into its terrifying mouth will make your jaw drop.

My dad (also in Colorado visiting Papa Lynn, and somehow always awake no matter how early I’m leaving) helped me load the luggage. We said goodbye, and I set off in the dark.

As the sky slowly lightened from black to navy to gray, I could tell my sunrise plans weren’t going to work out. Overnight, a badly needed rain had fallen, and the sky was blotched with heavy clouds.

I passed only a handful of vehicles, mostly elk hunters pulling RVs and getting an early start scouting campsites for the season. A mule deer slipped out of the sagebrush and crossed the road. My eyes sharpened a notch as the car wound slowly through the hairpin turns of Highway 92 along the canyon rim.

At 6:45, two minutes after sunrise should’ve been, I rounded a corner with a clear view east. As if precisely on cue from a cosmic conductor, the clouds narrowly parted along the horizon like stage curtains, and the red ball of an awaking sun emerged, pouring ruby light across the land.

In an instant, the world changed.

Moments before, it had been the bluish gray of any overcast, predawn morning. Now it was a swirling, dancing show of color and light.

I jerked the car into a small turnout and jumped out.

Peak autumn color was still a week or two away, but at this elevation - 9,000 feet - the tops of the aspens had already begun to turn. Bathed in the sun, they appeared ablaze against the bruised clouds hanging low above them, and the clouds reflected their warmth with bronze undersides.

Then I saw it.

Hovering just above the deepest part of the canyon and disappearing beyond one of the ridges, a glowing ball of rainbow. Golden light radiated from and around it with an intensity I don’t know if I’ve ever seen before.

I didn’t have the senses or the capacity to absorb what was happening. Only after it was all gone did I see something else.

Most of the time I’m somewhere beautiful, I want to capture it. I spend much of the experience looking through the little glass rectangle of my phone or camera screen, or scheming in my mind the best angles, focal points, compositions, and light that will hopefully translate what I’m seeing into something I can show my family or followers.

I work so hard to capture those moments that I fail to be fully captured by them.

This wasn’t one of those times. 

Perhaps it was a divine setup that saved me - the weather had already written off the prospect of watching sunrise over the canyon. I didn’t have time to engineer anything. And so my whole being was penetrated, exposed, laid bare by the raw beauty of this unexpected and wonderful light.

Impulsively, I snapped a couple shaky photos and a short, unrehearsed video, then slid my phone in my pocket.

For maybe a minute or so, the whole canyon felt like the walls and floor and pews of a brilliant chapel of stained glass.

A mighty river tumbled through the deepest crevices somewhere far below, and the sheer rock walls echoed its distant murmur up to me. The light danced across the mountains, trees, rocks, weeds - and across me, standing at the edge of a great divide, tiny and alone and overcome with awe. I just stood there, smiling, laughing, shaking my head, even softly weeping.

Creation was born in an instant with four simple words:

“Let there be light.”

It can still come alive in an instant. Around us, yes, but also inside.

We just have to be willing to turn aside, undistracted, as Moses did when a burning bush caught his eye in the wilderness. He was herding sheep when something strange made him stop and look. He couldn’t have imagined a meeting with the divine and the destiny of a nation were hinging on that moment.

As silently as they had opened, a curtain of clouds covered the sun, and the magical light disappeared.

But somehow I am still covered by it - like Wendell Berry describes the revelation of a certain kind of love and beauty that sustains the world at the end of Jayber Crow.

And I think I will continue to be.

Right before the sun disappeared (the rainbow already had)