This morning’s storm off the South Florida coast bore the classic characteristics of subtropical weather: mayhem. Wind bent the rain into waterfalls that punched holes in the skin of the Atlantic. Waves were drunken sailors in a barroom brawl. Dark skies threatened more anarchy.

   Suddenly, magic.

   The wind calmed like a theater crowd when the curtain rises. There on the watery stage a shaft of sun shot between the clouds. Voila. A rainbow.

   We have all seen them but every time those bands of color illuminate gunmetal skies I am as dazzled as when I first saw a magician pull a white rabbit from a black hat.

   Later on I recalled a prism experiment in 8^th grade science & my reaction when Mr. McCoy demonstrated that all color came from a single source: white light. We owe this discovery to Sir Issac Newton who did something all great scientists artists and leaders do: He noticed the way light traveled through a prism & began to make deductions.

   Aristotle thought the object owned its color. That light was colorless and the prism itself produced the color. This view persisted for centuries until Newton concluded that, “Light is color.”

   Standing in the classroom surrounded by Bunsen burners & drenched in the heavy smell of formaldehyde I gazed at the spotlight Mr. McCoy had rigged up. Every hue was hidden in that white light. He adjusted the prism’s position. As the beam struck the glass pyramid it transformed the sheet of paper on the lab table into a canvas painted with every color we know.

   I am fascinated by the idea that there is light & color beyond what our eyes can see. Light, like sound, vibrates at frequencies outside as well as inside our knowing.

   Are we prisms interposed between God & the world before us? Can we turn at the right angle so that all seven colors & the shades in between shine through?

-Erie Chapman