The long, cold arc

Winter rainbows, double suns / double sermons, mercies won

When the brittle air gets bitter, the beauty comes clearer. 

Hesitant at first, skittish like a puppy but then bolder and brighter, two shining rainbow columns flank the sun on a cold clear morning. Scientists name the phenomena parhelia (“beside the sun”). Amateur spotters call them sun dogs or mock suns. The prismed pillars are born from light refracting and scattering through ice crystals in clouds, reflecting into double rainbows, bending down to touch the earth on either side of the sun. 

They look like haloes. Wikipedia notes that sun dogs “can be seen anywhere in the world during any season, but are not always obvious or bright.” Do you need a more apt description of the holy? When I caught sight of the flashing bursts this week, I caught my breath. Pulled the car over on the dirt road and sat for a still moment, marveling at unbidden beauty. 

In the Book of Exodus, God went before the people of Israel, leading them through the desert as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. I had always pictured a bright white column guiding the people, but now I wondered for the first time if it might have been rainbowed: the whole spectrum of sacred light. Tracing the rainbowed arch of the sun dogs, I remembered the French term arc-en-ciel, a word that spans the sky of the page. When both sun dogs shine brightest, you can see the whole arc in the sky, flung wide open like a book, starting from the source and bending wide to its ending. 

In a week that brought its own ending and beginning, an inauguration happened on a holiday honoring a prophet who spoke many famous words. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” boomed forth Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his last sermon, delivered from the Canterbury Pulpit in the Washington National Cathedral. But the memorable, mind-bending words did not come from King.

A century earlier, the American abolitionist Theodore Parker had written: 

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” 

King crystallized Parker’s perspective into a single, powerful phrase that he used many times in speeches and sermons—and for the last time at the Cathedral, five days before he was assassinated:

“We’re going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And so, however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are, and however violent explosions are, I can still sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right—‘No lie can live forever.’ We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right—‘Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.’ We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right—as we were singing earlier today,
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future.
And behind the dim unknown stands God,
Within the shadow keeping watch above his own.”

To cite the original source isn’t a scandal or slight against King; the words come from the ending of his sermon in which he explicitly quoted other writers: Thomas Carlyle, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, and Theodore Parker. King was uniting his work to others, echoing how he and they and we, all of us, are caught up in the same long labors of the bending arc of justice. His last sermon was entitled “Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution.” A revolution is a turning of celestial bodies. A revolution is a turning toward justice. Today we see the long arc shining before us, bursting in bright cold clarity under an open sky. Where will it lead?

As I drove home under the sun, the pillar on the left grew taller. A towering, majestic twirl of rainbow, unmistakable in the heavens. Just then I noticed that the opposite sun dog had disappeared on the right. Now the arc had a beginning, but no end. Are we getting anywhere? Is justice possible here? Do we only have the original source of mercy guiding us on, but no light to show for ourselves here on earth?

Then for an instant, the sun dog on the right reappeared and grew stronger. The left side pillar evaporated as if it had never existed. Are our earthly efforts only our own? Have we forgotten the source of mercy? Is the end result all that matters? Do we think we can build anything without the Creator?

Briefly, both sides beamed bright and tall. You have to stop the car to snap a photo when this miracle happens, under a clear sky, on an empty road, because you are so small and the sky is so big. Everything under the heavens is right-sized like that. 

On Tuesday of this same beginning-ending week, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde delivered the sermon at the interfaith prayer service traditionally held after each presidential inauguration at the Washington National Cathedral. She spoke from the same Canterbury Pulpit where Dr. King preached for the last time. Budde had planned to preach on three foundations for unity: dignity, honesty, and humility. But then she decided to add a fourth point—mercy—and speak directly to the most powerful man in America, seated at her feet. 

I did not know this connection between cathedrals and pulpits, or the long arcs between preachers and quotes, when I started writing in my head on the drive home. This essay was supposed to be about sun dogs and shining pillars, the sky-dazzling ways that God keeps guiding us. But you cannot ignore where light is shining clearly, so I took a deep breath and followed where it led. Rainbows never last long. Even the brightest double suns will disappear.

The words preached this week at the National Cathedral enraged half the country and encouraged the other half, just like the sermon spoken from the same pulpit half a century ago. Truth is a double-edged sword: it cuts and divides.

We do not love the prophets in real time. We admire them in retrospect, nodding at their prescient words, quoting their searing wisdom in social media captions. But in their own unlucky hour of standing before us and proclaiming a bold word, we rise up in fury. How dare they. Who are they. What do they know. Sit down, shut up, stay in your lane.

Except their lane is the narrow gate, the hard road of truth, the way of justice and mercy. Easier to call someone else a fool than to change your life. Repentance is a rocky road, spinning your tires and kicking up dirt behind you. Better to peel out and pull away, leaving an angry dust trail in your wake, lest you slow down or sit still and admit you have been wrong. 

I have been wrong. 

We have been wrong.

Today ends the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. In this country, people of faith have spent the week screaming or snarking, despairing or demonizing the other. I want to roll my eyes at any idea of creating—let alone celebrating— Christian unity when all we do is argue over all that divides us. But I stare up again into the long arc, the bright halo between new suns, the pillars of rainbowed lights that shine when we least expect it. Perhaps the only unity is how we are gathered under the same clear-cold sky. The essential elements we share: air, light, God. We were given one planet. We have to figure out how to live here together. We cannot ignore the truth.

The arc surrounds the sun. And yes, it bends, but it bends long and far, and we lose sight of it. So whenever we catch the light again for an instant—dazzling red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet shining in the sky—we owe it to the Creator to stop and take notice. To ask where we came from, whom we are following, and what we hope to find at the end. 

“God grant that we will be participants in this newness and this magnificent development. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy. God bless you.”

(Delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1968.)

“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love, and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. The good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen.”

(Delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on January 21, 2025.)