True Colors

The Grand Prismatic Spring is the largest hot spring in Yellowstone National Park, a circular opening in the Earth's crust measuring over 200 feet in diameter and 120 feet in depth. From the viewing boardwalk a hundred feet away, it appears as a football field-sized of brown and golden-colored wet mud with water vapors rising into the deep blue sky, as if it were a giant cauldron ready to boil a field full of the region's Idaho potatoes. The waters of the spring are cloaked by the cloud of steam wafting from its surface.

But viewed from the vantage point of the nearby bluff, the Grand Prismatic Spring displays it's true and brilliant colors for which it is named. It appears as a near-perfectly round pool of brilliant blue, as if the earth were glaring, wide- and blue-eyed, at the sky above. Along its blue-green perimeter is a thin shoreline of yellow, surrounded by feathery channels of orange and brown that meander outward from the "eye of blue" like the feathers of a Mardi Gras mask. The prismatic colors are derived from heat-loving microorganisms that thrive in the hot spring and differ in the colorful pigments that they contain.

It was by error that I discovered the overlook that allowed this view from above. Had I only come to view the spring from its closest access point, I would have experienced this unique feature as a field of steam rising from a bland brown, flat landscape, without any appreciation of its true colors, depth, or scale of its immensity. I was grateful for this error, though it required hiking a much longer trail and ascending a mountainside.

Our view of life is often this way. We seek to know something by approaching as closely as we can and examining it with a self-assuredness that we have come to know it by our proximity to it. But our perspective or vantage point constrains or colors our impression of what we seek to know.

Isn't it amazing that the true colors of these invisible thermophilic microbes can best be appreciated from a distance? When we walk off a ways and take a less direct approach, we are often rewarded with a surprising and unexpected way of seeing.

The contemplative way of living is about discovering a new way of seeing, a different perspective from that which we are taught or seek by our natural inclinations. Our Centering Prayer practice helps us to gain a perspective of God, ourselves, and all of reality that we may have been missing.

If our view of life grows colorless and dull, may we be open to the Spirit's intercession, leading us to a new vantage point, a place in time or space - perhaps a new contemplative practice or silent retreat - that adds a divine dimension to our vision and enriches our experience of God's polychromatic presence working in and through us.  ​