Y: YELLOW (COLOR)

In addition to being the title of a Coldplay song, yellow is the portion of the visible light spectrum that spans the wavelengths from approximately 560 to 590 nanometers. Or, I should say, yellow is the color we perceive when an object reflects light of these wavelengths, while absorbing all the other colors. When you perceive yellow, you are actually seeing reflections of yellow: the “yellow” object is actually absorbing everything EXCEPT yellow. We often assume that you are what you take in, but when it comes to color, this is not true. They “are” the color they don’t take in! How’s that for appearances being deceiving? The ultimate metaphor: We really ARE what we REFLECT!

Isaac Newton wrote a book called “Opticks” in 1704 in which he set much of the record straight about color, prisms and light. Before Newton, it was known that certain clear crystal shapes could produce what was essentially a micro-rainbow, but it was believed that the color spectrum generated came from some function inherent in the prism, not the nature of light itself. Newton declared that that wasn’t so, showing that the prism was simply revealing what was hidden in the light itself. Spectral color was an essential quality of light and a prism simply channeled it through appropriate refractions to make it apparent. Newton’s work would actually influence metaphysics, as revelations of the true nature of light always seem to do. We humans just intuitively sense that light itself is the metaphor of all metaphors for broader realities.

Multi-colored is a big idea in my life. Rainbows around the throne descriptions of heaven help me avoid boring or sanctimonious versions of piety that push all things toward the middle. Old King James English words like “manifold” describing the wisdom of God, inspire me, and I have traced them deep (as deeply as I can) to yield other lovely old world descriptors like “motley” or “multifarious” or “variegated” (summoning images of flowers in vast gardens or bird or butterfly colorings or a violently blazing sunset over the ocean). These words strike a chord deep in me, assuring me that this God I have fallen in love with is indeed the AUTHOR, not the executioner, of variety and color--and excitement! It is a great encouragement to me when I read Hebrews 12:23 and its description of Zion (the heavenly home of all believers), realizing that the words “general assembly”—which evoke pictures of men in suits sitting in judgment of my colorful ways—could also be translated as something like, “festal gathering.” (I’ll let you supply your own contrasting imagery here!)

Recently I attended a seminar in which the leader asked us to close our eyes and consider: if God were a color, what color would He be? People testified to seeing nothing, or black, and I’m certain that the cloak of religious disapproval had obscured their view (which was the point of the exercise). I know that others who had come to know the love of the Father imagined white: bright, shining, radiant, and pure. Me? I told you I have this lifelong relationship with “multi-colored”! I see God—or at least His workings in my life—as dynamic “pulsings-forth” all over the spectrum—blazing out in every possible hue of color (and there’s not one that I don’t enjoy). I am fascinated by orderly (or chaotically) arranged COLOR and I am thrilled with what Isaac Newton set the world right about: white light is simply a perfect harmony of all the possibilities for color!

People blog to safely float their honest admissions out into the vast expanse of cyberspace like a Celtic coracle on the sea, or like an “electronic message in a bottle”, hoping for a receptive heart here and there. Here is my multi-colored honesty. Sometimes in church, I hear people declaring white light so boldly that I feel alienated from it. Simple statements of the “turn or burn” nature, so linear and causational, seem to blind me. I want to do right, be right, seek righteousness, but sometimes the lines I hear drawn from A to B don’t seem that direct. (Please hear me—I’m not trying to mess with absolutes—this is about application, and mostly about ACCEPTANCE of myself.) For me, the bright white light statement, “If A, then B….” has a million subtle, glorious shades, hues and meanderings through a variegated garden that only ENHANCE its truth (rather than subtract from it)! But sometimes, when I have voiced my multi-colored considerations, I have been dismissed as a rebel, or patted on the head as a sideshow (send her to the “artsy corner” and place her at a table in the coffeehouse)!

One day, in a blaze of LIGHT, I realized that this struggle to conform need never be my story. I realized I am not the one separating the pure white of God’s glorious love into all those colors I desperately need and joyously receive—they are already IN THE LIGHT! I am just acting as a prism, filtering what is there through my own diffracting tendencies and they can just as easily be reassembled back into the universal white. I am not creating an alternate spectrum—God is the white light and the multicolored, interchangeably, or better, simultaneously! The simple statement, “If A, then B….” contains all the swirly tie-dye splotches of my joyous application in between, whether or not any of them get pointed out! I got it!: It’s a UNI-verse!

I was born in 1960. I grew up with a generation who had grown weary of artificial light and had therefore chosen to seek color via psychedelic counterfeits. The prism on Pink Floyd’s album cover that is still being produced on t-shirts today is an iconic reminder of that generation and its sometimes-tragic quest. A few years ago, I was standing in a bookstore marveling at the plethora of new age self-help books that now seek to assuage inner hunger, when one of the most wistful songs of the Pink Floyd catalog, “Wish You Were Here” came on the store sound system. In that rarefied bookstore environment, where I think it followed Bach or Handel, I began to hear it in a way I never heard it in the 70’s. It seemed as if the words were a call from God, saying to a color-seeking generation, “I wish you were HERE: where I am; I wish you could be with Me in my prismatic designs, seeing my throne decorated with rainbows of covenant and my dazzling displays of mega-gemstone doors and cosmic displays of dancing light. I wish you were seeing that I am not the God of the monochromatic, but the God of the perfectly harmonized multifarious spectrum. I wish you were WITH ME—beyond the barriers of human ideas about religion and safely cradled in the only Heart that can handle you, ignite you and fulfill you.” And then I felt the multi-colored purpose for my own life, as I wept--literally wept--there in the New Age book aisle of the Barnes and Noble in Omaha, Nebraska. As the Psalmist said, “You, Lord: you light my candle!” (You illuminate the prism inside me and make me a kaleidoscopic dispersion of your light!)