We were driving through rain, rain that had filled two hours of the afternoon, on I-74 toward Galesburg, when we began to see the bright band of open sky on the western horizon. The contrast with the blue and gray bands of the sky above was stark. We welcomed the prospect of turning west toward Burlington. As sunset was approaching and the sun would soon be edging into that bright space, the open sky brightened into solid yellow, then startling gold. Soon the sun spread its blinding light under the blue clouds, sending golden rays shimmering across the whole landscape, highlighting the deeply scalloped row of clouds above the horizon, and fanning the bands of light in angles against the varying blue and gray tones of the clouds above.
I thought, “God’s grandeur…while all other arguments for God fail or come up short, the beauty of the earth still makes the case.”
The intensity of the gold light against the blue bands of sky increased, far surpassing any goldsmith’s skill, on a scale of magnitude infinitely greater in the whole gold bowl of the firmament. Then it grew even brighter. Our eyes had been fully occupied with the drama in the west. We were turning east into the cloverleaf onto US 34 when we saw the full rainbow spread across the eastern sky against a dark blue background. Before a moment’s thought I heard myself ask, “Who needs a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow when we have a sky full of it?”
It had been years since I had remembered that favorite poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness….”

We faced the western sunset, as the top edge of the sun slipped below the horizon, and the fan of colors shining across the clouds out of that white blue band of open sky on the horizon began to soften gradually from blinding gold into yellow, pink, mauve, red, and burgundy against the cloud ridges of blues, purples and grays. A bright reflection of the sun’s orb appeared on the western sky above the point where the sun itself had disappeared, and remained for several minutes mirrored on the distant clouds. While the ceiling of clouds darkened overhead, the silhouettes of trees and land stood black against the western brightness.
As the colors in that band of light shaded into intensely deep yellow and red, the sky appeared to flame behind the sharp silhouettes, as if the fires on the Californian coast had finally reached and filled our midwestern skies, yet they did not alarm. They impressed with overpowering awe.
Gradually, as we approached Gladstone and Burlington, the lights above dimmed into the blackness of clouds. The clouds were still overhead, no stars could shine through, and the bright band of light blue still appeared distant, although it stretched across the whole length of the western horizon as we took in the steepled lights of Burlington’s downtown.
“And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast with ah! bright wings”