Where the Rainbow Ends

The beautiful way in which light is refracted through rain produces one of nature’s outstanding displays. We have all stood entranced as a rainbow forms and when we have been lucky enough to see it extend across a valley or across a broad river then the effect is breathtaking. It has been described as God’s promise to humanity following the “flood” that the sun will continue to shine. Many legends have grown up around it, not least that if you can find the end of the rainbow, you will find a pot of gold. I remember well as a child running across fields in an attempt to find the rainbow’s end but it always eluded me.

The rainbow is probably the outstanding example of how nature combines utility with beauty. If we examine nature in any aspect, it is difficult to find ugliness; all seems to be carefully designed to be fair as well as practical. The great architects that humanity produces form time to time have tried their best to imitate this aspect of nature. They have designed buildings to fulfil their practical purpose but at the same time have shaped and decorated them so that they are things of beauty at the same time. It saddens me that modern society, with all its wealth, has produced so few buildings of beauty. There are exceptions of course but one only has to look at modern buildings that have been erected alongside those from more leisurely ages, to see what I mean.

I remember how shocked I was on my first visit to Hungary. As I drove into the Budapest City centre from the airport I couldn’t believe the ugliness of the grey, faceless buildings lining the route. They exuded an air, almost of menace to me, and I could only imagine the effect such buildings must have upon those unfortunate enough to live in them. Then when I arrived in the City centre and saw the magnificent parliament building on one bank of the Danube and the beautiful, former royal palaces on the other, the contrast was so stark I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Later I discovered that all countries under the yoke of communist dictatorships produced the same ugly, faceless architecture. Small wonder therefore that under such regimes people had to be virtually imprisoned in their countries to prevent them leaving in droves. Our surroundings definitely influence our thoughts and our actions; surround people with beauty and give them attractive homes in which to live and the better side of their characters will be stimulated. Put them in miserable, ugly blocks of apartments, build similarly ugly public buildings and the result will be to repress the creative urge, to suppress individuality and to produce a society that is colourless and totally lacking in initiative.

So much for human unwillingness to follow the example of nature and create architecture that fulfils a practical need whilst at the same time being pleasing to the eye. What about that “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow”? Because nobody has ever found it, does that mean it does not exist? I regret it does. It is another of those wild dreams and legends human beings have built up when impressed by the beauty and majesty of natural phenomena. However, it is a dream that has inspired many and without dreams, where would we be? It is the dreamers that make our existence here on Earth intriguing and exciting. Where would race relations in the USA be now had Martin Luther King not had his “dream”? Where would our knowledge of physics be had Einstein not dared to dream the impossible and think along lines ridiculed by those wedded to the status quo of Newtonian physics? Where our knowledge of the universe had Galileo not dared to dream that perhaps the Earth moved around the sun after all?

Our legends about the rainbow are much like those we build around life itself. Our physical senses so dominate our thinking and limit our understanding that many believe life begins and ends here on Earth; they believe life arose from the primordial mud, became the simplest of single celled organisms and then over many millennia evolved into the complex organism that is the human being. That of course is true but it is only part of the story, just as the rainbow we see is only part, admittedly a beautiful part, of the story of how light is refracted by moisture in the air. Unlike the rainbow however, there is a pot of gold at the end of our physical lives. It is the confirmation that life, our real spiritual life, continues in our natural environment which is the Spiritual World. Death is not the end but a beginning and a glorious beginning at that. As our life moves upwards and onwards so we learn gradually the reasons we chose to live an earthly life, for choose we did and each one of us for our own, very personal reasons. We will see there that despite the disappointments and the heartaches, our life on Earth was indeed beautiful like the rainbow and we achieved far more during it than we realise whilst still living here. So dream on, keep looking for the pot of gold and who knows? One day you may find it and even if you don’t, think how much more interesting your life has been because you dared to dream.