Sunsetting the Sunrise Project

I couldn’t resist this morning’s sunrise. I got up, turned all the lights off in our hotel room and snapped this photo while Glenn was in the shower. We are headed home to Pennsylvania this morning after a glorious week in Sonoma and Bodega Bay with our girls, their husbands and our three West Coast grandchildren.

Last year, I took a similar picture from the same hotel on the same day:

The picture that I took on Jan 2, 2025 was the second in a series of photographs that would run for the whole of 2025, capturing the dawn each day.

Here is the sunrise that started the whole thing: I took this from our bedroom in Bodega Bay at the dawning of 2025 on January 1:

I mean, after a display like that… who wouldn’t want to capture day after day of spectacular morning light shows?

I took photos wherever the dawn found me- all over the diocese in Central Pennsylvania, in Maine, Massachusetts, Florida, Georgia, Texas, California, Missouri, Virginia… and Quebec, Canada and the Dominican Republic.

When on a work trip I used my iPhone compass as I settled into a hotel room in the evening to determine where I’d have to look in the morning. On more than one occasion I wandered through a hotel lobby in my pjs and out to the parking lot to capture the moment.

Most of my pictures were taken from our front porch that faces East, or on my morning walk around the neighborhood. I have lots and lots that look like this:

And, of course, not every day dawned in shades of pink-orange-red-yellow. I have lots that look like this:

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Every day, you ask? Every single day? Well, almost. I missed one day: 19 October, 2025. We were at our diocesan convention. It was Saturday morning. I was reviewing notes for our business meeting, drinking coffee and … distracted, I guess, is the best way to put it. I missed taking a photo. It’s said that it takes only 21 days to form a habit, but here I was, towards the end of October, more than 10 months into this project and… the morning photo completely eclipsed my mind. So much for habits. Later that morning, though (call it coincidence or even a “God moment,”) one of our diocesan priests approached me at a break in the meeting and waved her phone at me. “You know how you take a picture every morning of the sun coming up?” she asked me, “Well, this morning’s sunrise was so pretty that I pulled over on my way to this meeting and took a picture to show you. Here.” She put the phone in front of me and, sure enough- pinkish orange streaks against an agate background. “I’ll send it to you, ” she offered, not knowing that I had missed taking my own photo that morning. I thanked her and told her that she’d saved my “every day” streak…

At Easter this past year I was invited to attend the Easter Vigil at St. Andrew’s in York. They do it the old school way at St. Andrew’s, gathering before dawn on Easter morning outside around a fire. I made the short drive on the turnpike from our house to York in the pitch black and, as I was driving, I had an uncanny sense of connection with the women in the scripture story who made their way to the tomb “while it was still dark” (John 20) to tend to the body of Jesus. Of course Jesus wasn’t there when the women arrived. He had risen. When I arrived at York, we stood around the fire ring and kindled the new fire of Easter and then we processed into the church where we sat in candlelight and heard the beginning of the story of our salvation. I had been invited to preach at the service and spoke about the theme of darkness and light, of death and resurrection, the dawning the day and the dawning of our faith. I told them about my Sunrise Project. In my preparation for that sermon I learned that there are really three stages of dawn or twilight- the time just before the sun rises at dawn that marks the transition from night to day.  There’s Civil, Nautical and Astronomical Twilight. These vary depending on how many degrees- 6, 12 or 18- degrees below the horizon the center of the sun sits before dawn. These three grades of twilight are defined by how much you light you need to perform the function that you want to do: Astronomical Twilight allows for star gazers to still have a good view of the night sky and its stars, Nautical Twilight- is a bit brighter, allowing for navigating at sea, and Civil Twilight is the amount of light that you need to move around in villages and cities in order to get where you need to go without bumping into things. These are, perhaps, subtle distinctions but they pointed out to me that rather than taking pictures of the sun rising, I was really taking pictures of the liminal moments just before the sun comes up.. which, I discovered, is all about hope and faith.

In the sky at twilight- whether it hints at a glorious color show or a muted, soft lightening of the sky- there is hope. There is possibility. There is the edge of discovery and delivery. And that is faith.

As it turns out, my 364/5 days of picture taking was an exercise in faith. Standing in the parking lot of the Hampton Inn in Somewhere, Pennsylvania… on the beach in the Dominican Republic… on a pre-dawn walk through sleepy Old Quebec…. or standing barefoot on our front porch in the quiet of our neighborhood, I had hope and faith that God would deliver another day and another opportunity for me to live and breathe and have my being. What a privilege to draw breath and to live our fragile lives. Each day of this project reminded me of the grace of God in the gift of life and the opportunity, as the Benedictines say, to always “begin again.”

My project for this new year, 2026, is focused more on my health and social issues of food and food production so I don’t expect it to be as pretty as Project Sunrise 2025.

In closing, here are a few more to share from 2025:

“Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.” – Isaiah 60:1