25 Months: “God is a rainbow.”
Rainbows seem to be the theme of my daughter’s early childhood. I had decided long before she was born that “The Rainbow Connection” would by our nightly lullaby. On mixed CDs of dozens of feel-good songs that I had made to play during labor, one very special to me—“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—played during the moment she was born and the first time I held her in my arms. And, somehow, during her second and third years of life, we seemed to see rainbows everywhere, spanning across the sky after seemingly every storm.
Maybe it was something about all these rainbows, taken together, that led to my her conclusion about the divine and the supernatural. I don’t know how to get inside the mind of a child who had only recently developed the ability to spit and blow and puff until two candles on her cake were extinguished. I don’t have a way of knowing, or even guessing, just what she meant when she announced that God is a rainbow. But there was such poignancy in the statement that I found myself pondering it time and time again.
God is a rainbow. God is… an illusion? A spectrum? An omen? A wish? An enigma? God is… the sense of calm and peace after a storm? A sense of beauty and fulfillment? A reminder of how small we are? I may never know just what she meant, but it’s a metaphor that this agnostic mom carries around and mulls over from time to time.
Rainbows seem to be the theme of my daughter’s early childhood. I had decided long before she was born that “The Rainbow Connection” would by our nightly lullaby. On mixed CDs of dozens of feel-good songs that I had made to play during labor, one very special to me—“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—played during the moment she was born and the first time I held her in my arms. And, somehow, during her second and third years of life, we seemed to see rainbows everywhere, spanning across the sky after seemingly every storm.
Maybe it was something about all these rainbows, taken together, that led to my her conclusion about the divine and the supernatural. I don’t know how to get inside the mind of a child who had only recently developed the ability to spit and blow and puff until two candles on her cake were extinguished. I don’t have a way of knowing, or even guessing, just what she meant when she announced that God is a rainbow. But there was such poignancy in the statement that I found myself pondering it time and time again.
God is a rainbow. God is… an illusion? A spectrum? An omen? A wish? An enigma? God is… the sense of calm and peace after a storm? A sense of beauty and fulfillment? A reminder of how small we are? I may never know just what she meant, but it’s a metaphor that this agnostic mom carries around and mulls over from time to time.
I don’t believe in God,
but I do believe in metaphors, in beauty, and in mystery, all of which are
wrapped up in the spectrum of light split apart by tiny water droplets suspended
in the air. And I do believe that “perfected praise,” and often the deepest
wisdom, tends to slip out of the mouths of babes, intentionally or otherwise. I'm certainly not the first to make this observation, but there really is wisdom in almost anything a child says, if you take a moment to listen.
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