A Certain Rainbow

Genesis 9: "Be fruitful and multiply"

In my old age it occurred to me: why do people have kids? Why do we bring lives into this world of suffering and evil and death? Even for a dog, I thought: As I held Daisy's little gray corpse in my arms, I cried to the vet, "It doesn't seem worth it!"

But as Gerard Manley Hopkins says, "there lives the dearest freshness deep down things." Some Love at the center of creation wants to extend Himself--and being created in Her image (v. 6), we did multiply fruitfully. We brought into being beings to love, and to suffer for, even to die for. We multiplied love.

The post-diluvian passage where God commanded Noah to re-populate the earth ends with God setting a rainbow in the sky: No more world-wide flood, it says, a covenant with "all flesh." In reading it today I remembered the perfect rainbow I saw in my back yard not long after my husband/soulmate Denny died. I sat down to marvel at the supernal arch stretching across the land and sky for miles, and understood it certain reminder of God's covenant with me, my human race, and all living creatures, including the birds, the bugs, and the dogs. There is a presence brooding over this bent bent world. Kingdom of priests, we are translated by our baptism into this life of many colors.

God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.