Catch Every Rainbow
Guest Writer: Isabel Anders
“The heav’ns are not too high,
God’s praise may thither fly;
the earth is not too low,
God’s praises there may grow.”—George Herbert (1593—1633).
We don’t get direct sun in our windows every day in the Pacific Northwest. But on days that it streams brilliantly through my den window, my crystal snowflake-shaped suncatcher turns it into multiple rainbows on my walls. Each one, to me, is a harbinger of hope.
Both sun and rain come to us free of charge—from forces, and perhaps beings—beyond our immediate perception (Matthew 5:45). We are, as humans, not “too low” to receive their bounty (and sometimes their onslaught)—regardless of our deservingness.
Even though we know there is no “high” or “low” in space as we now perceive it—it is all relational—the ancient images of light and darkness, sun and shadow (and many others) still speak to us on multiple levels. So it troubles me when popular trends co-opt these primordial, long-shared symbols and use them to keep others in or out of favor. We are better off allowing them to reveal to us our inner state of response to Spirit.
In my ongoing informal study of metaphor and religious language (after writing a thesis on that subject in graduate school), I have continually seen how stumbling on just the right image/analogy/picture says something about how we apprehend reality. Perhaps also, there is the depth at which a metaphor reaches us.
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that metaphor aids us in the “before unapprehended relations of things” and can enhance our understanding of them. But sometimes metaphor, the language of the parables, falls on deaf ears, as it did to many in Jesus’ audience. He explained to his disciples, his serious followers: “It has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 13:11)—thus implying that people would take his relatable illustrations on whatever level they could.
We don’t need to consciously bring our philosophy with us to catch every rainbow, to feel the cleansing wash of summer rain, or to dance to whatever music fills our ears with delight. Even as we think we “get” the meaning of the forces around us on earth, there may be surprises when light “dawns” in our hearts—or rainbows reveal to us shades of meaning and response that earth itself endorses in receiving from the generous Sun.
“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a
huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not
what a star is,
but only what it is made of.”
―C. S. Lewis in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Isabel Anders is the author of Becoming Flame, Spinning Straw, Weaving Gold, and Sing a Song of Six Birds (Mother Bilbee Tales). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D53LDWQ8?psc=1
Isabel Anders
rainbow shannon
Joanna joannaseibert.com