Nowadays, I really feel like a touring preacher — or a rabbi, maybe.A current Wednesday discovered me in Cleveland, sermonizing from the stage of a transformed synagogue — now a live performance corridor — to greater than 400 keen souls. Two days later, I carried the phrase to a packed auditorium in New York Metropolis. Through the web, I’ve recently evangelized in Mesquite, Tex.; Evansville, Ind.; and Cape Elizabeth, Maine. My message: Put together for the good and superior day that’s coming.On April 8, the universe will grace America with nature’s grandest spectacle, a complete photo voltaic eclipse. Alongside a roughly 115-mile-wide zone from Texas to Maine (known as the trail of totality), the brilliant solar will vanish for as much as 4½ minutes, plunging the earth into alien twilight. In the meantime, on that day, in every single place within the contiguous United States will expertise a partial photo voltaic eclipse, an attention-grabbing (albeit far much less superior) occasion.A complete eclipse may be life-changing. I witnessed my first in 1998, in Aruba. On the on the spot the moon absolutely coated the solar and the blue sky fell away, the photo voltaic corona — the solar’s outer ambiance — burst forth, shimmering like a tinsel wreath in outer house. Beside it, the planets sailed of their orbits. The sight was a revelation, for I understood viscerally that I’m a mere speck on a chunk of rock drifting across the solar. I now chase eclipses throughout the globe.Complete eclipses may also change the course of historical past. They’ve ended and fostered armed battle. A Nineteenth-century eclipse helped encourage America’s rise as a scientific energy, as I found when writing a guide on that occasion. And this 12 months’s eclipse, I pray, simply would possibly nudge our fractured nation in a hopeful, unified path.Suppose you like photo voltaic eclipses? Suppose once more. This man has seen greater than 20. (Video: Alice Li/The Washington Put up)It’s possible you’ll recall that seven years in the past one other whole eclipse traversed our nation. On that event — Aug. 21, 2017 — the trail of totality draped like a sash from Oregon to South Carolina, and it fell throughout an America that appeared on the verge of civil conflict.It was the primary 12 months of the presidency of Donald Trump, when protests and outrage frayed the nation. Partisan and cultural divides deepened: purple vs. blue, city vs. rural. One week earlier than the eclipse, darkness fell on Charlottesville, the place a white-supremacist rally met counterprotesters in a lethal conflict that epitomized the nation’s unraveling. But on the day of the celestial occasion, America coalesced. Its focus turned outward — skyward — for a shared cosmic second.At Southern Illinois College, when the lunar shadow arrived, 14,000 voices rose as one from the varsity’s Saluki Stadium. “It simply exhibits us how highly effective we may be once we all come collectively, even with every part that’s occurring,” a person within the crowd advised NBC Information.In Oakland, N.J. — the place townspeople gathered on the library to observe a partial eclipse however discovered there weren’t sufficient photo voltaic glasses for everybody to watch safely — those that had glasses shared with those that didn’t. “Given the experiences we’ve had across the nation recently,” a girl advised the native paper, “it’s good to see everybody coming collectively and making it work.”At an unlimited gathering known as SolarFest in Oregon’s excessive desert, the various 1000’s who got here from throughout proved so well mannered and cooperative that they left nearly no litter after they vacated the fairgrounds. “It’s immaculate,” stated one of many organizers, shocked.The scene repeated itself throughout the nation, in parks and metropolis streets, on mountaintops and seashores. People grew to become communities. Strangers have been now not strangers. Hardened individuals cried, hugged, fell reverentially silent.On this age of polarized politics, siloed leisure and individualized information feeds, the eclipse supplied a valuable shared expertise — one which lifted and joined quite than debased and divided. A survey by researchers on the College of Michigan estimated that greater than 150 million American adults noticed the 2017 eclipse instantly, whereas one other 60 million watched it on TV or the web. “It is a degree of publicity that dwarfs the viewership of Tremendous Bowl video games and ranks among the many most seen occasions in American historical past,” the examine concluded.Different scientists on the College of California at Irvine analyzed thousands and thousands of messages despatched on Twitter across the time of the 2017 eclipse and located that these posted from throughout the path of totality and on the day of the eclipse “exhibited extra awe and expressed much less self-focused and extra prosocial, affiliative, humble, and collective language.” These findings, the staff maintained, revealed the psychological influence of the 2017 photo voltaic eclipse. “Simply because the moon aligned with the solar up within the heavens, individuals down on earth aligned with one another in awe of this spectacular celestial occasion.”That is why I evangelize now.The full photo voltaic eclipse of April 8, 2024, guarantees to exert that unifying pressure much more powerfully. Virtually 3 times as many People — greater than 30 million — reside throughout the path of totality this 12 months, and greater than half of the U.S. inhabitants lives inside a day’s drive. I urge as many individuals as attainable to make that journey, to situate themselves within the zone of awe.Our nation has begun one other 12 months of bitter political campaigns, and it appears what sells is anger and division. I can inform, nevertheless, that there’s a craving for one thing extra — one thing totally different.On the finish of my current speak in Cleveland, an viewers member submitted a query to me onstage. “Eclipses seem to carry a lot of humanity collectively,” it started. “Why can we not proceed these wonderful methods … after the eclipse? How can we capitalize on them?”It was then that I needed I possessed the knowledge of a rabbi, for I don’t know the reply. Maybe asking the query, nevertheless, is a begin. A four-minute spectacle is not going to restore the material of our nation hire by years of mutual mistrust, but if sufficient of us stand within the path of the moon’s shadow on April 8, the eclipse could remind us of the unity we lengthy to revive. That alone would possibly mend a number of stitches.David Baron, former NPR science correspondent and up to date chair in astrobiology on the Library of Congress, is writer of “American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World.” He has witnessed eight whole photo voltaic eclipses on 5 continents.