Article July 2, 1979 Issue

Where does the rainbow end?

Betty Parrott

When you were very small, did you ever long to find your way to where the rainbow ends? I did—but it always seemed to end over the other side of the valley or far away on the horizon. The very first holiday pantomime I was taken to was called "Where the Rainbow Ends." In the play there was a wicked green-eyed witch who tried to stop the children from getting to the end of the rainbow and finding the hidden treasure. She scared me so much I spent the next half hour outside, talking to a nice program lady—and I never did learn how to get there!

Years later, in my teens, I spent a night in a mountain hut high up in the Austrian Alps. We set out roped together long before dawn because we had to reach the summit and cross a glacier on the way down before the sun's heat made the descent too risky. The first rays of the sun reached us through the early mist as we climbed up the snowy peak. The valleys way down below were still in darkness, stuffed full of cotton-wool clouds. Suddenly beneath us there appeared something beautiful—something I had never seen before—a great circle of light, all colors of the rainbow. My companions explained it was due to the refraction of the sun's rays on the water droplets in the misty clouds. I took it to be just another of those wonderful mountaintop experiences and treasured it—but gave it no more serious thought until some years later when I was teaching a class of twelve-year-olds in a Christian Science Sunday School in London.

The class were unusually quiet. The day before there had been a bad accident in their part of the city involving many children. For several of the class it had been their first awareness of death. As I prayed to God to give us what we needed to understand, I saw again that circle of rainbow light and thought of God's covenant with Noah after the great flood. We looked it up. The Bible records God as telling Noah: "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: and I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh: and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh."^{Gen. 9:13–15;} As we talked about it we realized that the rainbow—that comforting symbol of God's care—isn't really just a bow at all. It only looks like a bow or semicircle if you're down in the valley or on the plain. If you're high enough up a mountain, way up above the clouds, then you see it as it really is—a complete circle of all the colors of light, the unbroken refraction of the whole white radiance of the sun. What a comforting reminder it was of life without beginning or end.

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