Friday 3 April 2020

Reclaiming the Rainbow

One bonus of the current coronavirus scare is that some of the self-indulgences of political correctness appear to have taken a back seat for the moment. Only some, others are too well-entrenched to be uprooted so easily and new ones are being formed, but nonetheless when life is boiled down to its basics some of the froth can be skimmed off. With that in mind, perhaps now would be a good time to restore an ancient symbol to its proper place.

The rainbow was one of humanity's most cherished images, a sign of beauty, hope and God's love for humanity. With its panoply of colour and graceful arc, it was a piece of perfection brought down to Earth, a glimpse of heavenly glory.

No more. The image has been corrupted, deliberately so. Now it is a tarnished thing, dragged down into the world of politics and aberrant sexuality. There is nothing Satan delights in so much as the perversion of goodness, beauty and truth. He doesn't want to destroy it. He wants to sully it and make the pure impure. He wants to turn it against itself as part of his futile attempt to prove to himself that he is equal to God. He can only do this with the participation of human beings eager to be corrupted because of their own degraded nature. Such people hate the good because it shows up their own iniquity. What they hate, they want to tarnish which is why they adopt symbols such as the rainbow to their cause and seek to turn them to their ends.

This post is not attacking homosexuals. They are born bearing a cross (as we all are to differing degrees and in different ways) and should be supported. But supported in the right way which means guided to truth, shown love with love expressed in spiritual ways not ways that cater to and reinforce the fallen earthly self and thereby confirm it in its fallenness. Sympathy to people struggling with difficulties is absolutely the right attitude of any civilised person but sympathy should not mean total acceptance of what is contrary to divine truth. Now the pendulum has swung so far that anyone showing reservations about homosexual behaviour is stigmatised as a bigot when all they are really doing is seeking to uphold truth and the natural order of creation. My criticisms are not directed towards homosexuals as such but to those who seek to legitimise and even celebrate the misdirection of the creative energy which is a sacred thing. I criticise the profanation of the sacred.

The rainbow is not a symbol of diversity or equality and it cannot be for the reason that these are not real things, not things rooted in God's reality. (Diversity in the modern sense is not multiplicity.) The peculiar nature of a symbol is that it is a formal representation of an archetypal truth. In the case of a rainbow, of hope and beauty. You cannot have symbols of non-existents nor can you co-opt existing symbols to provide justification for artificial inventions. A symbol is actually a manifestation of an inner reality and that is why it provides a conduit to that reality. Stealing a symbol to acquire its spiritual benefits is a moral crime which not only fosters a lie but damages the symbol's ability to feed the true imagination.









3 comments:

Adil said...

Wow, I actually saw a rainbow today and it was beautiful indeed. I had almost forgot about it, because of the politicization of the symbol.

I admire your conciliatory attitude to homosexuality overall. I have learned to think about the sexes as a polarity rather than fixed categories. Some men will be more cognitively female, and some female outliers are more cognitively male. Truly the sexes are complementary, sort of like how colors themselves form a spectrum and gradually merge.

Jesus himself seems the perfect embodiment of masculine and feminine. Jung also talked about this, and how important it is for people to balance both their male and female natures.

William Wildblood said...

I don't entirely agree with what you say about Jesus or the Jungian interpretation. Jesus was wholly a man but a real man includes within himself what are regarded as feminine qualities though expressed in the context of his masculinity. So the idea is not balance, which implies an equal proportion of each, but a full awareness of the whole of psychological and spiritual being either as a man or as a woman not a mixture of the two.

Adil said...

Jesus was certainly The Man which means he also elicited feminine qualities. We can compare to prophet Muhammed who was more masculine and forceful, but that does not necessarily entail more "manly". I agree that balance might have been the wrong word since androgyny is not the ideal after all - but I was trying to emphasize the wholesome nature of Jesus. I'm not even sure Jung fully appreciated that since I recall he thought Christianity needed a forth feminine Person in order to be complete. Anyway, I know you're not a great fan of Jung but I thought his ideas might be relevant to the topic. The main point being that any person must seek to reconcile the sexual opposites within himself in order to be complete as a man or a woman.