As a young man growing up in Northern Ireland, I believed the world to be black & white. Not the physical world of course, though with our old 50’s TV sets everything jumped out of the screen in depressing shades of monotonous grey. Oh, what a joy it was when my Aunt Marie got the first colour TV in our family circle. Nothing was ever the same again!
Anyway, those zealous, heady days of youth saw me living and moving in a world of evil black and an extremely holy white. I’d better explain. My dour Irish culture was a tribal construct of ‘us’ and ‘them’, viz. Protestants and Catholics. The infamous troubles only highlighted this predominant world view. Of course, the goodies were us, the besieged loyal defenders of all things British and the baddies, the Catholic rebels who wanted the Pope of Rome and all his Jesuit troops to replace our hard-earned Protestant heritage.
Thankfully, somewhere along the line, Jesus appeared to step in and I soon switched my allegiance to evangelical Christianity, albeit a radical Charismatic brand. The black morphed into all those existing faith traditions who didn’t dance in the aisles or speak in mesmeric tongues, while the white became an authoritarian stream of revivalism that sucked me into its beguiling mission.
Of course, such black and white takes on life can only last for a while. For the Light eventually dawns that there are more hues than we first imagined in the multifarious Mind of God. The Divine is a Transcendence of Colour; a pure Light yes, but One that refracts into a bounteous spectrum of tantalising tints. Our black &white mindsets are only meant to be temporary guides through the early days of our time on planet Earth. Fairy story settings that keep us safe until we find our psycho-spiritual bearings in the great, but often confusing Dance that we call life.
Thankfully, we don’t have to go searching for the colour that our hearts were born to reflect and enjoy. For the Divine Artist, will find us with a stoke of their internal brush, a splash of unexpected pigmentation that will change our perception for good. The time of the Masterpiece is of Its choosing, a decision to begin on the chequered canvas of our black & white programming. The time for conversion, from ego’s dualistic paradigm, to a spontaneous and uncontrollable frenzy of colour. A foretaste of the limitless sweep of tints known as the Glory of God.
Writer Dylan Morrison 
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