Was it Angels or Merely Sun Rays? Does it Matter?

Was it Angels or Merely Sun rays? Does it matter?

The sky slanted–

gray shafts cloud to cloud

streaming silver bars

looked like angels,

not the kind with wings

blooming out of their shoulders

or the others with four faces

eyes, oh so many eyes

or a man who walked up

and wrestled hard, throwing out a hip.

But still looking into the sky

it was like I was seeing angels,

a whole company of light,

not like the golden shafts

that touch the ground

like Jacob’s ladder

that set a longing in me

for Jesus to come, to catch us up

to him in the sky,

that old, debunked story—rapture–

Christians delivered from God’s wrath.

that gave me comfort

as a weeping, lonely child,

in a world that hurt so much

I wanted to die.

These shafts didn’t drop

sun driven to earth.

They were silver beams

high as jets flying from Europe

over the pole,

over the clipped fields and a dairy farm.

Is it right to call this light angels

like I am really seeing them

on a mission high in the sky?

Is it right to see the world

as a child, to see the heavens

as more than clouds,

the planets more than spinning rocks and gas?

Or am I crazy, am I reaching too hard

to see what I’m still blind to see?

Then the next night, a good day

before the storms, thunder to blizzard,

the sky looked like a dragon–

long rippling flesh–

like Wyrm wrapped around the sky.

Last summer I saw a white rainbow—the newborn sun angled just right to throw it into the mist. Was it just some odd refraction of light or something more? Or was the white rainbow itself miracle enough?

This year a flock of redwing blackbirds have settled here. Last summer I greeted a couple as though they were my friends. Now when I walk, they settle on trees that are still twigs and billow their feathers calling. Our friendship seems real, not saint like, but real. Bruce says its normal for them to follow us.

How come it’s easier to experience the demonic, deep darkness that can attack in dreams than it is to perceive angels? How come we can sometimes feel that darkness twist up between people like a dust devil full of black dirt? Here’s a poem about how powerful those dust devils can be.

The drifts curl over

Snow shaped by wind

The banks with lips curled

Over the road shoulder

By the trees the snow is sucked back

As if the tree said back off

And the snow curls back

leaving a curved bowl

open to grass

like the woman I hugged

because the feeling,

how do I describe it

other than dread?

Something heavy, dark

that didn’t make sense

coming from either one of us

but coming between us.

The snow curled over itself

a cornice that could split

and slide down a hill

because I stepped into her space

like she has stepped into mine

calling me friend when we are not.

I wish I’d been honest

the snow roaring and tumbling

across the fields

blurring the line of sight

to other farms,

the township plow

clearing the roads.

If I’d said my peace,

instead of the silence

like we wield as women,

of snow falling, piling up

around our ankles, our knees,

wind so hard you fear

being knocked upside the head

by a branch flying off a steady tree.

Snow is no

match to the sun

and coming spring.

Do we not perceive them because angels are more furtive, humble, not showing off?  

I know of evangelical authors who lost their audience and were condemned because they claimed they had spirit guides, angels. But do these spirit guides mean well, or are they creatures clothed in light, good at deception and accusation? I sure as heck don’t want one. A wise friend, heck a friend with enough quiet to give me space as they listen to my stories would do me just fine. Laughter too.

Aren’t we supposed to be like children so we can enter the kingdom? This week while I waited for my physical therapy, I was twenty minutes early from not reading my calendar, two little girls played with their stuffed toys, tossing them to each other, gentle, returning my smile with theirs. Simple toys. Simple play.  

Let me tell you how an angel plunked down beside me and my little mixed breed Australian shepherd, Gweno, named after the morning star in Welsh. But it wasn’t just me that angel watched out for. Here’s a poem called “Feeding Hogs in the Ozarks”:

Three farmers drunk on whiskey

Took me with them to feed hogs.

They measured themselves

and the foreman asked

if I’d ever been raped.

They joked about a goat woman–

her screams were so loud–

Pete was so big.

I felt like I’d stepped

into snow shot with bright sun.

I could not see, but I could sleep

and think about when “Pete” tried

to make me dance on macadam.

I braced my arms against him

and tried not to drown in his breath.

He said the moon was a harvest.

“We might fall in love and elope.”

Hogs chucked a sack of corn

the farmers poured in the mud. Pete said

he wondered whether I liked men-

when I offered to help him haul feed

and refused to kiss because of his wife.¹

I stepped out of that Suburban, parked back at the horse farm, where “Pete” was supposed to feed the mares and come right home. My dog and I caught a ride with him back to his home and my car. His wife had sent me to make him return home on time, to spend the Sunday with his family. Whiskey and Coke, I remember whiskey and coke. She looked me in the eye and said she trusted me because of my faith. Back in New York, my mother scolded me for playing this hard with fire, with my crush on this family because they sheltered me from the brutality of poetry school.  

Fifty years later, “Pete’s” son found me on Facebook because I told him to “Listen to the Day.” Both he and his brother were the only two children I ever baby sat, while their parents went dancing. On our way back to their house, deep in the Ozarks, we stopped by the White River. The day was unusually quiet, no human sounds, no planes, no cars, no talk. I challenged them to listen. Being in poetry school, I wrote a poem, “Poster,” that my teacher called poeticky:

Skip a stone across the river.

Watch the circle widen from each step

you take as the world ripples for a minute.

Listen to the day.

Dip your sight into the current

Caught molten by the bridge-focused sun.

Sip blindness brewed in a locust whine.

Listen to the day.

Bury your fingers in light growing

Like moss between crags of the trees

Peel it back and smell the shade.

Listen to the day.

It wasn’t just me that angel was protecting, but it was Pete’s son, who would find me on Facebook and renew our friendship fifty years later. When he traveled throughout the country, he’d stop and listen for no human sounds. I believe he said he only found two places that were so utterly quiet. He found me when I wondered—What good am I? He offered a taste of the truth of the promise that the children of the barren woman will be more than she who had children:

Sing, O barren one, who did not

Bear:

Break forth into singing and cry

Aloud,

You who have not been in labor!

For the children of the desolate one

Will be more

than the children of her who is

married,” says the Lord.²

Within a few weeks, “Will’s” trucking company sent him on a route that brought him within ten miles of our home. He got permission to stay overnight and parked his semi at our neighbor’s farm. Who would have thought a friendship begun fifty years ago and dropped for those years would rekindle? Who would have thought those minutes by a dried up stream would have so much impact? And those prayers, I used to whisper looking at moonlight out their guest room window, were answered, with “Will” and his family coming to faith in Jesus.

I guess I’m sharing this to let you know that those angels, though furtive, are nearby, and whispered prayers are heard, and one day we will sit at feast with the people whose lives we’ve touched for good, and even though our motives might be stained, God somehow figures out how to make it come right. As C.S. Lewis says,

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.³

References

1 Katie Andraski. When the Plow Cuts. 1988. p. 10

2 Isaiah 54:1, ESV

3 CS Lewis Weight of Glory. William B Eerdmans. 1975 p. 15

Photo by “Will” of the river where we talked about listening to the day.

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