the lovers, the dreamers and me

I'd like to say that I've always found them magical and mesmerizing. I'd like to pontificate on how they've impacted my soul my entire life, signified something incredible since my childhood, but none of that really applies. Unlike most of the signs in the created order which I hold personally dear (stars, trees, thunderstorms, dew-decked spiderwebs, fireflies, fog), rainbows, like rain, only began to emerge as reminders of divine promises in my early adulthood.

Rainbows themselves as a scientific occurrence always fascinated me, I suppose -- some of my earliest childhood memories involve Mom and Laura and me dashing outside after a rainstorm and jumping around ankle-deep in wet grass looking for a clear view of the sky (our yard boasts more trees than any on the block) in hopes of sighting a rainbow. Science and art class yielded their own fruits on the subject which I also enjoyed. My favorite source, of course, was Genesis, featuring the rainbow as the conclusion to Noah and the Flood, and also hallmarking one of the only specific origin myths of a natural phenomenon in the Bible.*

But while God's setting the rainbow in the sky as a sign of His promise never again to flood the whole earth is a fabulous story, it never struck me as immediately compelling every time I saw a rainbow. I didn't really think, "Oh, look, a rainbow -- thank God there'll never be a worldwide flood again, I was really worried about that, whew." I was more inclined to ponder prisms and light waves, and the beauty of a dark waterlogged sky alive with sunshine.

Something happened over the past year, though -- I kept seeing them everywhere, far more frequently than I'd ever remembered noticing them before. Possibly the flatness of the landscape in southwest Michigan, and the resultant broadness of the expanse of sky, had to do with it; but it still struck me as weird that they were pretty much everywhere, and cropped up when a rainbow was the farthest thing from my mind. Driving to Meg and Phillip's on a Friday night, looking casually up to check the weather on my way out the door from work, heading south into Mishawaka to catch dinner with Boss-Lady -- quite often the least intentional glances pinned my vision on a glowing ribbon of spliced light hanging between sun and cloud.

They usually materialized (or whatever; although now that they've proven that E = mc squared I suppose I can talk of light in terms of matter) just before, during, or immediately after a rough patch -- a bad day, a bad week. A rainbow sighting began to feel comforting, though inexplicably. I felt that maybe God was telling me something, and my antennae was on the wrong frequency to pick up the meat of the message. I kept casting around in my brain for any reason why a promise not to flood the earth would have any meaning for me in a difficult time. I can be something of a literalist, you see, and worldwide floods didn't seem to have much to do with the difficulty of my little life.**

Then one morning a couple of weeks ago, I didn't feel like reading further in Galatians and, yielding to whimsy, flipped to Isaiah, my favorite Old Testament book (such divine passion, such beautiful promises, such poetry), and let the pages fall where they would. My eyes fell on this:

The LORD calls you back,
like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit,
A wife married in youth and then cast off,
says your God.
For a brief moment I abandoned you,
but with great tenderness I will take you back.
In an outburst of wrath, for a moment
I hid my face from you;
But with enduring love I take pity on you,
says the LORD, your redeemer.

This is for me like the days of Noah,
when I swore that the waters of Noah
should never again deluge the earth;
So I have sworn not to be angry with you,
or to rebuke you.
Though the mountains leave their place
and the hills be shaken,
My love shall never leave you
nor my covenant of peace be shaken,
says the LORD, who has mercy on you. (Isaiah 54: 6-10, The New American Bible)

Falling as it did in the middle of the beginning of my discovery of God's unchanging love for me, this passage brought tears to my eyes, and I underlined it and read it several times and loved it, savoring in particular "I have sworn not to be angry with you," and "My love shall never leave you."

I still didn't make the connection.

Then about a week later, on the phone with my mother, I noticed that the snow-sleet-rain mix pouring from the sky was lit to glass by a ferocious sun. Running out to the porch, I scanned the eastern horizon and located the rainbow, a broad sash in the sky over the orchard. I told Mom about it, and then suddenly stopped hearing her as the implication bowled me over.

This is for me like the days of Noah...

How had I missed that? How had anyone? How had no one in all my years of Bible study ever mentioned how the symbolism of the rainbow took on a profound new significance in the context of grace and unconditional love? Rainbows aren't just a sign of no-more-flood; they signify a "covenant of peace."

So now rain, which has over the past five years come to signify to me (on experiential, and not textual, basis) the presence and provision of God, has deepened and broadened to include the rainbow, signifier of the love of God.

Which meant a lot to me today, admitting the resurgence of yet another bad stretch (well, I knew it wasn't going to be cured just because I was going home) and taking a deep breath to start fighting again.*** It meant a lot to me particularly because on the way home from a difficult weekend, feeling stretched a little too tightly and brittle in the face of all the unknowns yawning at me, while I talked on the phone with my childhood best friend I looked out the window and there, in the overcast Western PA sky, despite a hazy sun dim enough behind the clouds to look at directly and no precipitation falling at all, hung a clear slash of rainbow, stillness to my motion, but seeming to match the pace of the car, so that as I talked I could stare at the spliced prismic beauty of a multilayered promise, and know that however difficult things are, have been, will be, however I might fail in faith and hope, the love of God will never leave me.


Footnotes:

* Obviously I'm not including the entire Creation story of Genesis, where everything that exists is attributed to the creative power of one God, or the Tower of Babel, which explains the multiplicity of human languages; by "specific" I mean an explanation of why something is the way it is in nature. Greek mythology, for example, specializes in origin myths -- the rebellion of Prometheus explains the existence of fire; the abduction of Persephone by Hades and the subsequent wandering search of Persephone's mother Demeter, goddess of agricultural growth, and her neglect of her tasks explains winter; Zeus' weapons of anger explain thunder; etc. The Bible places the coming-into-being of almost every natural thing at the very beginning, and all from the hand of God. Rainbows therefore are interesting in that they come into being later, and stand as a sign of a promise.

** Yes, you can think me obtuse and stupid, especially when the words I generally use to describe depression involve trying to stay afloat in vast bodies of water without any land in sight. That connection didn't occur to me until just now, which strikes me as amusing; but even so, I'm generally wary of drawing sweeping parallels between a promise to the world about something literal and a promise to me about something metaphorical.

***I decided today that depression is the hibernation of the will and diseased hope, since human beings cannot live without hope and a person mired in depression begins to see life as an endless stretch of colorless unchanging days blank of excitement or interest or companionship or vitality or joy. Of course immediately after that decision I started thinking about The Neverending Story and the Swamps of Sadness, and how death in the swamp came from giving up hope; and then I started thinking about Paul's brief statement And now these three remain, faith, hope and love, and then the author of Hebrews' Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see, and how faith and hope and love are all interconnected and depression swallows all three which is what makes life to the depressed individual so untenable, for if these three are the only things that remain, and they're gone, or veiled, no wonder the void is so horrifying, like The Nothing, which consumes everything, which is worse than death.

And then I thought how fighting depression requires the forcible resurrection of the will -- the will to will, if you will -- which is why it's so difficult. I also thought about despair, which is etymologically the literal absence of hope (the English word "hope" is Germanic in origin, so we don't tend to catch the Latinate "sperare" -- the root for "hope," noticeable in the Romance languages, e.g. "esperanza" (n.) for "hope" in Spanish -- which renders "de" "sperare": to be without hope). Despair is only definable in terms of hope, in terms of hope's absence. And I believe that the will is vitally connected to hope, because the will, which involves volition and desire as well as choice, seems to have little purpose in human terms without hope, because why would one will anything if not for the hope of something good to come out of it? -- and hope also has to do with desire, and hope involves faith, since hope is partially comprised of belief, and love is at the foundation of everything.

But it's funny how, even when everything seems melodramatically to be dead, mired, sunk, drowning, empty, void, remnants of faith, hope, and love still remain (perhaps Paul was talking not just about their existence but their stubbornness -- they remain, as if they choose to remain despite all odds) to buoy the will. Also I have finally admitted to the hilarious, contrary fact that despite all my struggles with this stupid affliction, I am incurably an optimist -- for which I am extremely grateful, and for which I give myself absolutely no credit. Life is too beautiful, and there are too many promises (one of my favorites: I shall see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living...), to allow the will to curl up and die. Sorry; there's too much left to see, too much to do. It will all turn around one of these days. Keep on keepin' on. Keep on tryin'. And then, unexpectedly: joy.