Organic Rainbows - Musings from The Nederland

In the past hundred years the European continent has been through wars and devastation that are beyond comprehension. Some years ago an inferno engulfed Yellowstone National Park. Some years earlier yet, Mt. St. Helen lost her saintly beauty and ejected a cubic mile of volcanic wrath into the sky and wiped out a pristine paradise.

Did it really happen? Was civilization wiped out in Europe? Was Yellowstone’s beauty forever lost? Was alpine heaven lost forever beneath acrid volcanic ash? As tragic as these events have been, they may well prove a profoundly important reality – love and beauty really are the most powerful forces in the universe.

Researchers were given opportunity to see two cataclysmic natural disasters take place and then simply watch what happened afterwards. As it turns out, beauty was seeded in that volcanic ash and in the burnt offerings of the great forests of Yellowstone. It has been astonishing to researchers just how fast these regions have come back to life, sprouting with new possibilities. The miraculous re-generation of life at the sites of these two incendiary nightmares again reminds me of Phillip Yancey who said, “ Moments of pleasure are the remnants washed ashore from a shipwreck, bits of Paradise extended through time.” There was great pleasure to be derived from finding newly emergent life in the acrid volcanic ash that covered much of the American northwest. There was grand consolation to be found in the new life erupting from the burnt sentinels that once stood in Yellowstone. Carrying it a bit further, GK Chesterton said, “Even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing.”

There is a power that brings anything out of nothing. The Christian scriptures say that in the beginning there was nothing. They tell us God is love. They also say that love is the only thing that will last forever. Quantum physicists are now finding that in the beginning there must have been something besides the nothing - a creator who could make anything out of nothing – and did. At one level one could say there was nothing at Yellowstone or Mt. St. Helen’s after they were immolated. A visit there today would suggest Someone was indeed able to make anything out of apparent nothing.

For those that lived in Europe during the 20th century, millions saw their worlds reduced to apparent nothingness. I write this from a country that had not seen involvement in a war in six generations when the Third Reich showed up on the doorstep and did not knock before entering with its odious nightmare. The Dutch people had a radical experience with apparent nothingness – losing so much of what was near and dear to them – their cities, families, landscapes, arts, peace, culture, and history. Yet today the Dutch people have their cities, families, landscapes, arts, peace, culture, and history. What happened? Love and beauty were able to outlast the Third Reich, which is now nothing.

I just had an all-powerful reminder of the power of beauty and love outlasting the hideous. Several hours from here is one of the most spectacular botanical gardens in the world – the famed Keukenhof tulip garden. It is only open seven weeks in the whole of the year and we happened to be there on the day when every single plant, all seven and a half million of them, were at their prime of life – a wondrous combination of tulip, hyacinth, rhododendron, azalea, orchid, cherry tree, daffodil – this all on a 70 degree day clear day under a soft china blue sky. My friends Hans and Yne, who lived through that horrid era of nothingness, exclaimed all day that they had never seen these gardens looking nearly as fine as they did today – as if they were seeing them for the first time. Perhaps, in a way they were.

The heavenly rainbows we so delight in, as magnificent as they are, are by their nature short-lived, require the presence of a storm and dark cloud to occur, and are just rare enough as to invoke our enchantment instead of our indifference. Rarity seems to be an important dimension of beauty. It is impossible to describe with words an organic rainbow that one can physically touch, smell, embrace, and enjoy for hours, without the requirement of a storm being present. Such is the Keukenhof Garden.

It is simply beyond astounding to wander around eighty acres with 30,000 other stunned observers, marveling at a beech forest containing more than seven million plants in a range of colors beyond counting, seasoned with lakes and fountains containing all manner of water birds. While roaming about this paradise in a spectral fugue state, I could not but realize that a very large chunk of Paradise had washed up on the shores of our lives this day. This was no tiny fragment from a shipwreck.

This garden is a tangible exhibit of the reality that love and beauty do outlast the darkness that comes at night in the human experience. Even as the Dutch people endured the torment of the Nazi darkness that swept across the land, much as fire swept across Yellowstone or volcanic pumice swept across the northwest, the seeds of indescribable beauty were there all along, just waiting for the right time to once again bloom.

I am now far from those gardens, but they are no less real. They are radiating their organic spectrum to yet another thirty thousand pilgrims seeking beauty and meaning. The Christian scriptures also say that God has made Himself known through the handiwork of His creation – not through anything else. As the world struggles in so many places with geo-political crisis, with economic failure, and with upheaval of the highest order, the seeds of His beauty, of His reality are yet to be found in the midst of even the darkest place. It’s just the nature of seeds that they are sometimes very small. On occasion one gets to stand in the sun and see an organic rainbow in full bloom.

He spoke very loudly to us today.