Way off in the distance, over the farm on the corner, where the road turns toward the tracks, I saw a murmuration, birds rising and falling, swelling and drawing in again. Faint. A rare sight by us. Though a couple weeks ago our trees were loud with starlings flocking to fly south. They crackled with their voices. Not the same as sunlight, but with the energy of animals that fly-angels.
I walk by the willows and hear red wing blackbirds. Five, six meadowlarks rise out of the field as we were driving Morgen. Two birds, one a sparrow, the other a grackle watched me from the same wire where I entertained the barn swallows. A robin drank out of our dog dish bird bath. I’m not sure why they are still here at the beginning of October.
When we went to the store, I thought I saw another murmuration, but then realized it was dust from the bean harvest. A week ago our neighbor said that he quit harvesting his field because the beans were so dry they fell out of his header. But a recent rain brought enough moisture that he was able to pick his field. On our way home we pass combines working the fields and dust billows up, dust that can clog farmers’ lungs.
Angels have been cut into trees to make room for powerlines, their wings spread wide, ready to lift up. Lift up my heart, I lift it up to the Lord.
The air in my body, soul and spirit have cleared. It’s been months, maybe years, since I’ve felt so light and joyous. I am surprised how my heart is lifting up. Debilitating fatigue and brain fog have dissipated.
It’s not like I’ve done anything spectacularly good to welcome this joy aside from chucking the guilt that any good I do is never enough, or feeling “there is no condemnation” sinking closer to my bones.
I wonder if there are angels settling down next to us on our couches, maybe sitting on electric wires along with the grackles, or watching as they sit on beams in the barn. It’s not just me that’s feeling angels’ presence. Even in storm torn Appalachia and Florida there are reports of people helping each other, chain saws singing angels’ songs. In the midst of splintered homes and businesses people extend hands to each other. Prayers rise like sheets of light in the night sky.
Despite the grinding loss brought by two hurricanes, fires out west, and political tensions, joy is in the air. Matthew Gunter, Bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Wisconsin, posted the following on Facebook, the words singing the joy I was feeling.
Gunter quotes Frederick Buechner in Wishful Thinking: “Sleight-of-hand Magic is based on the demonstrable fact that as a rule people see only what they expect to see. Angels are powerful spirits whom God sends into the world to wish us well. Since we don’t expect to see them, we don’t. An angel spreads its glittering wings over us, and we say things like, ‘It was one of those days that made you feel good just to be alive,’ or ‘I had a hunch everything was going to turn out all right, or ‘I don’t know where I ever found the courage.’” (1926-2022),
In the same post, Bishop Gunter added this poem: ‘The Day with a White Mark’ by C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness:
Was it an elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part
Of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted wave
Of a journeying angel’s transit roaring over and through my heart?
My garden’s spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the omens harden;
The planned and unplanned miseries deepen; the knots draw tight.
Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season.
It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers only are white.
Yet I – I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of
My day was like a peacock’s chest. In at each sense there stole
Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew
Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.
As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there,
And shining roots worked visibly far down below one’s feet,
So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard
Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat,
Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible
Longings and ice-sharp joys that shook my body and turned me pale,
Or humbler pleasures, chuckling as it were in the ear, mumbling
Of glee, as kindly animals talk in children’s tales.
Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?
No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends
On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself
Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.
What if the angels surrounding us are as faint and joyous as those birds swinging here and there, catching the wind to go south. What if our prayers call angels for other people to guard them and give them a shining tent full of light. Chariots of fire might be rolling along our streets. Strange four headed creatures might follow us like our dogs, watching. If we had eyes to see we might be startled by how close they are. It’s why I pray chronic prayers for some people, to hold back the powers that break us. The prayer, Keep Watch Dear Lord sending comfort to the grieving says shield the joyous.
The fields around us have been harvested. I miss my friends, the cornstalks that grew from tiny green shoots shoving aside clods of dirt to becoming elegant ladies showing off their purses. Their their dresses swished when they walked. I delighted in their perfume when they tasseled. Now their leaves are strewn on the side of the road. The view down the valley to silver grain bins is back but I miss my shadow carried by the cornstalks. When I walk out in the morning there’s a pool of quiet in these fields even though the morning roars with gravel trucks on the main road. But these fields are still a pool of quiet, with grackles gathering the pavement, grouping and flying up to the wires. And the clean, blue sky.
Nearly a decade ago I wrote this perspective about joy for our local NPR station.
“Weep with those who weep,” tells us to be empathetic to those who are grieving.
But there’s another side we don’t think about: “Rejoice with those who rejoice.” That too is a call to empathy that is just as real as the sad side.
Brene Brown says, in Daring Greatly, “Joy is probably the most difficult emotion to really feel. Why? Because when we lose the ability or willingness to be vulnerable, joy becomes something we approach with deep foreboding.”
She goes on to elaborate on how “we don’t want to be blindsided by hurt … so we literally practice being devastated or never move from self-elected disappointment.”
There’s an old prayer people offer at night that says,
“Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.”
Even the ancients knew how rickety joy can be by asking for the joyous to be shielded.
Besides, what right do we have to feel joy when the world is so troubled these days? We are notified of, if not bombarded with, horror. Just walking into our days can drag.
So when joy billows and bellies a person’s sails — if they are shouting for joy, or jumping up and down, or just plain feeling good — please consider the other side of empathy and celebrate with them.
I’m Katie Andraski, and that’s my perspective. WNIJ, October 20, 2015
The other week, Bruce and I visited a local Orthodox church to learn about the Jesus prayer. It’s very small, smells of old wood and feels closer to a barn than our modern Lutheran church. All around were icons of Jesus, Mary and the saints. I kept turning back to Jesus with his olive eyes and fingers in a pose that spans religions. Father Stephen talked about The Hesychast, a book about a modern living saint, as an introduction to prayer. He warned that it could be extreme but worth reading. He offered to loan us a copy, but I said I’d order one from Amazon. It arrived a week later with Greek words on the package. It had come from Mount Athos, the mountain where monks’ prayers uphold the world. I am almost certain whoever packed this prayed for me as he was packing it, placing the label and putting it in the mail.
All that day people handed me the gifts of their stories, which added to the joy bubbling up because I felt God’s wisdom sweeping through me with more prayers to be made that sometimes fall out of words into silence, and pictures of light dancing between people. Angels are in the air I think. Writer Jon Sweeney posted the following poem, written by the late Ted Loder:
Posted by writer Jon Sweeney, (his book Sit in the Sun, about what cats can teach us about prayer is a delight.).October 11, 2024
The Rustle of Angels
by Ted Loder
God of thunderous silence,
deliver me from words
that gush, but slake no thirst,
that charm, but scour no truth,
that seduce, but conceive no intimacy.
Hush me to quietness to hear the rustle of angels
in the unaffected laughter and tears of others,
and myself;
and be stunned to awe by others’ simply inexplicable
being-there-ness,
their bodies, breathing, eye-lit-mystic beauty,
and by mine.
Ease me, Unhurried One,
into the depths of accurate listening
that, beneath the babble,
I may attend to the pleading in others’ eyes,
the longing in their smiles,
the loneliness in their slump,
the fears in their curses,
the courage in their squint,
the wisdom in their scars,
the joy in their timid loves,
the faithfulness in their beginning yet again;
that on the whispered, groaning, stammering edge
of so much hope and need and grace
I may begin to wrestle to some limp of understanding,
some tilt of trust,
some murmur of gratitude,
for this not-so-minor miracles,
for this merely beloved all of yours,
we are.
And then the skies fired up, with bellies pink as an overheated Bessemer stove. The sun itself hurled its own joy at the earth, so the sky roars with greens and reds, bars of crystal light. Were these lights angels? Mrs Horse was restless, neighing for us to bring her in, put the wood barn between her and that livid sky. At midnight I looked out the guest room window, and saw a layer of shadow, darker than night, and a row of green like cartoon trees flaring up. Through the camera I saw a tiny colored light that spun. I saw a dark spot that could be a bug, or dirt on the window, or something else. I need to check that out.
