To Walk with Saints and Scholars

And then there are the rainbows….

They never stay put either. Right in front of me, in my yard or on my hike, a rainbow will appear. And it is so vibrant, so tangible-seeming, that I believe I can touch it. But as soon as I move to do so, it shifts. Or it goes. Technically speaking, that makes sense. A rainbow is made up of only sunshine, all that water, and perspective. So as soon as I shift my position, as soon as I change my perspective, the rainbow changes. Because I am also “making” the rainbow.

It appeals to both the scientific and the symbolic parts of me that Ireland has so many rainbows. For a rainbow to form, the sun must be low in the sky behind me, and the water must be present in front of me. For a rainbow to be visible to me, I have to be between the sun and the water. And we have plenty of both here – sun and water. Contrary to general thought, it does not really rain all the time in Ireland. It just rains at least a little bit every single day. But the sun always has a few moments as well, so Ireland is built for rainbows with all that rain and a daily dose of sun. And each time it happens, the rainbow does not appear in the same place for every viewer even when it is the same rainbow. Seeing a rainbow at all, and what that rainbow looks like when we do see it, is standpoint dependent. In other words, the observer makes it so.

And this reminds me of my favorite line from Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This week, that is the closest I can get to hope. And that ain’t nothing. For if our perspective on the rainbow makes it so, if our thinking on all that grieves the world can shift the grief to some form of good, then we will be okay. Things may not be all we want them to be, and the world may hurt just as much, but we can move to the left just a little and see if the rainbow grows brighter. If it starts to fade instead, we can ooch our way to the right. We can stand on tiptoes or squat down, and the entire time, we can watch for that bend of the sunlight dancing with the particles of wet that shows up just beyond us because we are between the sunshine and the rain.

Of course, God has whispered this hope to us for generations in the stories that have been handed down to us. The dove descends, and Noah knows land is near. The rainbow appears in the sky. The dove descends, and John knows that he has baptized the one chosen to teach us how to love. The rainbow in the sky is the reminder: all may be fraught, we may be stuck between the sun and the rain, but right there in front of us (if we choose to shift our perspective), heaven is at hand.