Rainbow Experiences by Christa Anbeek

(a summary by @nietzscheswritings)

The chapter opens with the author describing a period of exhaustion and irritation during a rainy late summer. Meetings and lectures fill her days, and she questions whether age is beginning to weigh on her. During a walk with colleagues from the Remonstrant seminary between Nijmegen, Ubbergen, and Beek, she experiences a rare moment of relaxed companionship, followed by a dinner in which one colleague confesses he is considering returning to the Catholic Church after seven years with the Remonstrants. This disclosure moves her deeply, noted at the moment when “tears sprang to my eyes” as he explains his conversation with a Catholic bishop about returning.

Later that week, the seminary holds a long-delayed farewell dinner for trustees. Internal tensions arise over the cost of the restaurant, but the president reassures the author before asking her to give the farewell speech for the interim rector. As she prepares this, she reflects on whether the past seven years have been good or bad, finally framing them through a haiku on autumn and farewell that expresses a sense of impermanence and sorrow.

Her days become filled with looking backward and forward. She attends an exam service held by a Remonstrant student on International Coming Out Day. The student publicly narrates her own coming out, and the author observes the scene as a small gathering of mostly elderly participants, feeling its incongruity with the theme of renewal. She describes the broader context as a dwindling community “clinging to something long gone” before driving home “weary and disillusioned” through persistent rain.

She turns next to Ermelo, recalling her years from 1998 onward working as a spiritual caregiver in a psychotherapy center while holding an academic post in Utrecht. Her connection to Ermelo is deeply tied to Peter, a psychiatrist and her lover, whom she met at the Tiltenberg during Zen weekends and study programs. The dissertation she was completing at that time focused on “life-sive-death” in Japanese thought, which she had discussed with her Zen teacher Mimi, then still alive.

The chapter then shifts to Anbeek’s current methodological evolution: she has “begun to shift [her] starting point to lived reality,” though this shift has not solved her theological problems. This leads into the section Dance of living and dead, which contains the chapter’s single Nietzsche reference. Graham Parkes is cited as quoting Friedrich Nietzsche on the Italian port of Genoa, a place Nietzsche enjoyed. The text emphasizes the tension between joy and parting: every lively person carries a “dark shadow” that follows them. Nietzsche likens this to the final moment before an emigrant ship departs, when there is “more to say than ever before,” even as the ocean waits with “desolate silence” for its “prey".

Parkes then juxtaposes Nietzsche’s image with Nishitani’s reflection on Tokyo’s Ginza: in a hundred years none of the living will remain, and to truly see reality one must perceive life and death simultaneously.
The author recognizes Nishitani’s line from her own dissertation and reflects on the “fundamental sameness of life and death,” describing liberation as living “Ohne Warum” or “without a why,” a selfless surrender to existence. She recalls Ikkyu’s Skeletons and the stained-glass “Totentanz” in Bern as artistic depictions of life’s entanglement with death. In Dancing with the living, Anbeek describes how dreams keep her parents, brother, and beloved Peter constantly present. These dreams show them alive, accessible or unreachable, sometimes guilt-inducing. Mimi, her Zen teacher, also appears, pale as if risen from the dead. The Tiltenberg estate continues to return in these dreams, alternately restored or ruined, yet still functioning as a spiritual center.

She reflects on homesickness for places and people, admitting she sometimes believes she can find remnants of the past, though recent visits show this to be illusory. Everything is “the same and yet different,” and she realizes the past survives only in memory. The only way forward is to start again: by loving new people and allowing herself to be seen, she experiences a form of rebirth every day. The dead will continue “dancing” within her as she chooses to live among the living.

The chapter closes with a passage from Hannah Arendt, which emphasizes that human life, though finite and moving toward death, contains the inherent capacity to begin anew. Anbeek affirms this personally: “I was not born to die but to begin”.