I am very late to this video party, but by reading the year-end New York Times account of memorable phrases in the USA from 2010, I came across this one: “double rainbow.” Did I miss something? It turns out I missed, in a theological and also in a mystical sense, everything. For the “double rainbow” in question is a remarkable video made by a man who lives in Yosemite and was overwhelmed by a rainbow that he saw outside his house.

This clip, which attracted many millions of views, has attracted a fair number of makers-of-fun, skeptics, and killjoys. But color me utterly captivated. If we take it as what it presents itself, as a man overwhelmed by a rainbow, nay not even a single rainbow, but something I had never even considered possible to observe, a double rainbow, then this guy seems to be having something close to what many of our religious traditions would call a mystical experience. How could I have missed it — especially teaching undergraduates this semester? Why did they keep this pearl of great price buried? Take a look for yourself, and notice the variety of ways in which he allows himself to be overwhelmed by the suchness of the rainbows having residence not only in his landscape, but in his world, in his existence, his feeling of presence-to these rainbows. It is enough to remind one of the famous phenomenologist of religion, Mircea Eliade, for whom the encounter with “this rock, this tree, this city, this mountain” — in the words of Eliade’s friendly interpreter, theologian David Tracy (in Dialogue with the Other, page 66) — are elected by the sacred to disclose “the sacred time of the origins of the cosmos.” We are in the presence of a “disclosure of power,” argues Tracy (in one of the remaining modes of Catholic experience and argument which I can defend and with which I — and clearly many others — can associate myself and ourselves). Here is the now-famous video:

And when this fellow, “Bear” Vasquez, whose mystical experience became a media event, appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show, he started off winningly, with humor and a rare public relativization of sexual and drug experience in favor of a nature mysticism:

But while as R&T readers know, I have a wide latitude for the theological calibration of profane experience,

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