The solar eclipse of April 8 is drawing enormous attention, some of it theological and liturgical, given its coincidence with the Solemnity of the Annunciation and its proximity to the Easter Octave. But there is also a spiritual lesson to be drawn, one that reflects our experience of the shadow of sin in our lives.

The experience of sin, when properly apprehended, is one of darkness, even a sense of being lost, unable to see the light. Yet the reality is something quite different: God’s light never ceases to shine and is far more abundant than the darkness of sin. As St. Paul teaches, where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more (Romans 5:20-21).

The eclipse is an analogy of that. The light is temporarily obscured, so that a great shadow falls across the Earth. For those in the heart of the shadow, it appears as if the light has been extinguished. Has it disappeared altogether? Yet at the same time, the light in shining brightly everywhere outside of the shadow’s path, in even greater abundance. The light remains greater.

It is somewhat different than our experience of day and night, sunrise and sunset. There, we expect the sunlight to fail, but know of its return at dawn. The evening is welcome, as respite from work, and the night a time to rest. We don’t expect the sun to shine at midnight, and so we are not fascinated — or disturbed — when it doesn’t. Yet still, we do associate the darkness with sin and death; we speak of wickedness being wrought “under the cover of night” and the “sleep of death.”

An insight into the experience of a spiritual eclipse was given recently by Pope Francis on Good Friday. He composed meditations for the Stations of the Cross and made an intriguing addition. He added a new station: “Jesus’ Cry of Abandonment.” (To make room, he eliminated the traditional Ninth Station, focused on the third fall of Jesus.)

The cry of dereliction is painful to hear:

“From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matthew 27:45-46).

That darkness is akin to an eclipse. The sun’s light shone no more, one of the dramatic signs that the whole of creation was witnessing the astonishing sacrifice of the Son of God. It was not a solar eclipse, though, as the moon at Passover is in the wrong phase (full moon) for such an eclipse.

(The New American Bible translation of Luke 23:45 needs to be changed, as it is misleading, attributing the darkness to “an eclipse of the sun.”)

The Holy Father gives a powerful spiritual interpretation of the darkness. It is a something of a spiritual eclipse. Jesus is experiencing the darkness of sin.

“Jesus, this prayer of yours is unexpected: You cry out to the Father in your abandonment. You, the eternal Son, dispense no answers from on high, but simply ask why? At the height of your passion, you experience the distance of the Father; you no longer even call him ‘Father,’ but ‘God,’ almost as if you can no longer glimpse his face.”

For those ancient civilizations that worshipped the sun — the Romans had the god Sol Invictus — not to see the sun was to lose sight of god’s face. For the Christian, our own sin can cut us off from God. Grave sin, or mortal sin, cuts us off from sanctifying grace — we are in darkness and in the shadow of eternal death. Hell is not being able to look upon God’s face forever.

Why does Jesus cry out in such manner; for what reason do we hear the cry of dereliction? Pope Francis explains:

“Why? So that you [Jesus] can plunge into the abyss of our pain. You did this for my sake, so that when I see only darkness, when I experience the collapse of my certainties and the wreckage of my life, I will no longer feel alone, but realize that you are there beside me.”

Pope Francis notes that the cry of dereliction is a prayer, specifically the opening words of Psalm 22. It begins with dereliction but ends with proclamation of the Lord in the midst of the assembly. So Jesus is giving the answer even as he asks the question: Cry out, to be sure, but cry out to God, who remains the light even when we don’t see it.

That is the answer to a spiritual eclipse, to our own experience of the darkness of sin, the Pope states:

“In my own dark night, when I keep asking why, I find you, Jesus, the light that shines in the darkness. And in the plea of all those who are alone, rejected, oppressed or abandoned, I find you, my God. May I always recognize your presence and turn to you in love.”

In the daily rhythm of sunset and sunrise, we experience something of the cosmic drama of death and resurrection. An eclipse, with its disruption of those familiar rhythms, invites us to look anew at the light and darkness around us. As we look, the Holy Father invites us anew to hear the cry of Jesus from the cross, the cry in the darkness.