The Vicar
Revd Gail Uttley,
The Vicarage,
8, Church Farm Close,
Lofthouse.
WF3 3SA
Telephone: 01924 823286
The Rainbow
The Old Testament has a wonderful tale of the creation of the first rainbow.
Scientists speak of the traditional rainbow as sunlight spread out 'into its spectrum of colours and diverted to the eye of the observer by water droplets. The rest of us just stand and gaze at the colour in the rain‑grey sky, which delighted us as children ‑ and delights us still. We do not for a moment consider the "colour" of light, yet through a rain drop, the whole range of colours can be seen, and the beauty is spectacular.
"I like rainbows ‑ they're the colour of God” The West Yorkshire Ecumenical Council newsletter quotes a "5‑year‑old theologian from Wharfedale" Yet religion has proclaimed a monochrome God. This is a god on whom each religion, each denomination, makes a unique claim ‑ a claim excluding anyone and everyone with a different understanding, an experience alien to one's own. Over the centuries, the results have been appalling. Wars, persecution torture ‑ and on a lesser scale, pride, arrogance, exclusion, bigotry. No religion is free of guilt
Some broadsheet journalists currently lay responsibility for all the world's suffering at the feet of the religious, calmly ignoring the complete lack of religion in Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung jointly responsible for the deaths of between 50 and 80 million people. But we cannot deny the realities of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Poeroms, the Armenian massacres, and many, many more. And in recent days, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, Srebrenica, 9/11, BA Madrid and London.
Is it religion itself, that belief in a supreme being, a god of compassion and mercy, of justice and purity? Or is it the arrogance that claims my knowledge of God is right and everyone else is a pagan, an infidel, an unbeliever, a heathen, bound for the fires of an eternal hell?
Is it that we are so afraid of this God that we have to believe we have all the truth there could ever be about God, lest we ourselves are rejected by him (or her). How could we ever know all there is to be known? We who are finite, of the one who is infinite?
Some will argue that no vicar should suggest such a thing. Didn't Jesus say he was the way, the truth, the life? I know he also said that he had other sheep who were not of this fold. "Them also I must bring.‑‑'
Which brings me back‑ to the five year old, with more sense than most theologians ten times his age. Perhaps this child was seeing God with his heart, with his imagination, with the warmth of the sun on his face, the breath of the wind in his hair, and not with academic conclusions drawn from age‑old writings.
As we contend in our world with those who are so sure they are right that they will commit suicide to further their cause, as we face within our church those who deny the Christian faith of Rowan Williams, because he will not accept the literalist meaning of every single verse of the Bible, as we remember Margaret Clitheroe crushed to death in York because of her Catholic faith and Thomas Cranmer burned at the stake because he could no longer accept papal authority, let us, like the West Yorkshire Ecumenical council, take the rainbow as our symbol. 'The colours of the rainbow can only be seen through the rain drop; perhaps the colours of God will only be discerned through our tears.
"I like rainbows ‑ they're the colour of God
Gail Uttley