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On rainbows

Suzanne DeWitt Hall
Sep 4
2 min read

The entry below is excerpted from Transfigured: A 40-day journey through scripture for gender-queer and transgender people. Thought I'd share it today given all the attention being given to crosswalks and other celebrations of diversity in Florida and elsewhere.

The Subtle Shifting of Gender

When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. (Genesis 9:14-15 NRSVCE)

After the massive flood which Noah survived by building an ark, God promised their anger would not burn so hot so as to result in total annihilation again. The symbol they created for that promise is a rainbow.

The LGBTQIA+ movement chose the rainbow to illustrate the concept of spectrum and variety. Flags and posters include vivid, contrasting stripes. But in God’s rainbows, there are no distinct demarcations between violet, indigo, blue, and green. The colors gradually shift from one to the next without our ability to detect where one ends and the next begins. The shift between hues is dissolving and soft.

We sometimes hear the phrase “all the colors of the rainbow,” but our ability to perceive color is a tiny subset of the hues which other creatures’ eyes can see. Human retinas are limited in their cones and rods, and human minds are just as limited.

Maybe even more so.

The magic of light contains color which no creature can see, not even those with the most complex and specialized visual systems. The Creator alone is witness to the full majesty of the spectrum.

God’s palette of shifting hues is vast, subtle, and beyond our comprehension. We humans are like those colors. Subtle, shifting, unique. Non-binary. Unable to be labeled or singled out.

We are all beautiful, one-of-a-kind, and fully seen by God’s eyes alone.

The white light streams down to be broken up by those human prisms into all the colors of the rainbow. Take your own color in the pattern and be just that.

Charles R. Brown

Suzanne DeWitt Hall (she/they) is the author of the Where True Love Is devotional series, the Living in Hope series of books supporting the loved ones of transgender people, The Language of Bodies (Woodhall Press, 2022), and the Rumplepimple adventures. You can find a full list of her work here: https://amzn.to/3vVPF