LIGHT
There are as many myths about the Hebridean Isles as there are visitors to them. One of my favorites tells that after resting on the seventh day, God rose on the eighth and found his pockets still full of jewels. Like sprinkles scattered across a sweet treat, he tossed them into the waters off Scotland, and so the Hebrides shimmered into being.
Perhaps it is this jeweled quality that also gave rise to her legend as the Land of the Dancing Rainbows. Because the horizon yields to little and light scatters at a slant, rainbows often dance against storm clouds, as if joyfully celebrating a storm’s end and the return of the light.
Though I have been to Iona three times, I have yet to witness that mystery. But last year, after shepherding twenty-five pilgrims across Northern Ireland, Jennifer and I took a couple of days to rest and explore new sites. On the last day, a storm escorted us along the Antrim coast back toward Belfast. As the skies cleared, we glimpsed the most vibrant rainbow either of us had ever seen.
Light not only touches all matter,
but awakens everything that matters.
Jenny Newman
Mad with wonder, we jetted and darted through a village until we found a perch overlooking the sea. What we found was not one rainbow, but three!
We wept. I am weepy even now remembering.
It was the perfect end to our journey. And even more wonder-full, just seventy miles beyond the center of those radiant bows, lay Iona: the island that, for us, holds unparalleled holiness and promise of restoration.
That’s what light does when it moves freely through the world: it bends, scatters, and refracts according to its nature, revealing patterns of order and beauty from which we may learn. Through such patterns, a rainbow reminds us that while light quite literally enlightens our understanding of countless realities, it also possesses a consummate mystery with an ability to awaken in us all that matters.
“If there is magic on this planet,” the naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote, “it is contained in water.”
Light, however, is the magician of the cosmos.
Bruce Watson [1]
There are countless creation stories attempting to narrate the birth of all that is, all of which can be categorized into one of five types, but, in each type, the “creation of light is universally regarded as a gift.” [2] In the Hebraic and Christian origin story, God creates light three days before creating the sun and moon, suggesting that light is far more than that which emanates it; it is the essence of all that is.
For centuries, light has invited both calculation and wonder. In the seventeenth century, René Descartes turned his attention to rainbows themselves, tracing the path of sunlight through a raindrop and showing how its arc appears at about forty-two degrees from the sun. Isaac Newton soon followed, discovering that white light holds every color within it, waiting to be scattered through a prism. Christiaan Huygens imagined light as a wave rippling outward, while centuries later Albert Einstein revealed that it also behaves as a particle, a stream of photons carrying fire across space. Importantly, in his theory of relativity, Einstein helped us see that light is the primary force of the universe. Light’s constancy is so fundamental that time and space bend to accommodate it; the warping of space is what keeps us tethered to earth.
Light is more than illumination; it is the standard-bearer of the cosmos, guiding us into order and growth. [3]
With all that’s been discovered, we are still learning how light works. Scientists describe light in paradox: wave and particle, ordered and elusive, constant and mysterious. [4] However we name it, light is the universe’s oldest traveler, burning toward us from our sun ninety-three million miles away, bending the wills of space and time, breaking open its beauty in rain and stone and sea, and bursting forth in flora, fauna, and phantom - the most beloved of which is a rainbow!
Within that bow are billions of droplets of water, each offering only a single thread of color, and yet together they weave a tapestry that no single drop could ever reveal on its own. That is one of the rainbow’s quiet dualities: it is utterly personal, you alone stand at the precise angle where those particular drops paint their arc, your head as the center point of the bow’s circle. And yet, it is also profoundly communal, requiring a whole chorus of droplets, all refracting and reflecting in concert.
While we know ourselves to be surrounded by the magic of light, conditions must be just right for its glory to radiate as a rainbow. First, the sun must be behind you and the air before you filled with countless water molecules, tiny drops of water falling and floating about in front of a cloudy sky. Then, you must gaze at a forty-two degree angle into the lighted mist. Only then, might you see the light reflecting, refracting, and framing the earth in a bow of glorious color.
The rainbow is not an object but an event, a living relationship between light, water, and the witness who beholds it. In that shimmering exchange, the ordinary elements of earth and sky conspire to reveal something more radiant than themselves, and they do so with particularity; no two people have ever seen the same rainbow; our individual eyes even see different rainbows! And no rainbow’s end has ever been captured. We are as likely to get to the end of a rainbow as we are to grasp the sunlight reflecting off the water.
We were so immersed in the moment, that we barely captured a picture before the second bow disappeared. You can still see the faintest arc on the right though.
As if one miracle were not enough, sometimes the sky doubles the gift. A second bow appears, fainter and inverted, born of light doubly-reflected through each droplet. It is as if the cosmos itself cannot resist repeating the refrain, layering glory upon glory, until the eye can scarcely take it in.
If you are supremely lucky, you might even witness a supernumerary bow along with them, which is what compelled our chase that rainy afternoon.
Supernumerary bows are one of numerous different types of rainbows, and they are the result of the optical interference of mist confusing and scattering pastel light beyond the inner arc.[5] Despite what the science suggests, supernumeraries are anything but interfering; they cast a magical glow, heightening the vibrancy and deepening the experience of awe.
After concluding our pilgrimage dedicated to the Wild Edge of Wonder, the double and supernumerary rainbow wildness catapulted us straight into the heart of wonder and ignited profound gratitude.
Nearly a year before the rainbows of Northern Ireland renewed our weary spirits , on Iona, a lavender Hebridean sky stretched across the horizon, and her light compelled our delight. None among us had ever beheld such beauty! We were surrounded by purples and pinks, the whole of earth around us reflecting the sky’s magnificent light. Jennifer and I ran outside, laughing and spinning through the wind’s wild waves. We delighted not because the sky had staged a show for us, but because, in that moment, it felt as if we were caught within the flow of its radiance. In that luminous moment, joy refracted through us like tiny droplets of water within the violet arc of a rainbow, shimmering in concert with the light moving freely around and through us.
Light is the cosmos’ constant, the universe’s measure, the force that bends space and time, and that which calls forth life in all it touches; yet; it is also the illuminator of life and igniter of joy.
How might these realities help us hear Jesus’ claim to be the “Light of the world” even more clearly? And, what could it mean for us to follow Paul’s charge to live as 'children of the light'? Perhaps it calls us to learn from light and to live in harmony with its fundamental force: offering constancy in the face of chaos, radiating love in ways that call forth life in all we encounter, illuminating hope for the world around us and revealing the magnificence of all things.
Such light could awaken all that truly matters.
[1] Watson, Bruce. Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age. Kindle Edition, xii
[2] Watson, Light, 5.
[3] Watson, Light, 180-185.
[3] Boyer, Carl B. The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics. Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey. 1987,
[4] Boyer, Rainbow, 285-287.