Calling on Our Better Angels
By Tom Reiber
January 26, 2003
Genesis 32: 22-31
ere's a scene in the movie, Grand Canyon that touches on angels.
I know a lot of you are familiar with that film because back when we were doing regular movie nights we watched it at two different houses on the same night.
But for those of you who haven't seen it, or for whom it's been a while, I'll give a little background.
Kevin Kline plays an immigration lawyer named Mack whose car had broken down the night before.
Mack was on the verge of being robbed when Simon, a tow-truck driver played by Danny Glover, showed up and saved him.
Mack returns to the garage the next day and offers to take Simon out for a meal by way of saying thanks.
Simon tells him he doesn't have to do that but Mack insists.
As the two of them settle in for their meal Simon asks him why he felt like he had to repay him.
So Mack tells him
a story about another close call he had a few years back.
He was walking to work, not paying
attention.
He thought the light changed
and he stepped out into traffic.
Somebody grabbed his collar and yanked him back and just at that instant
a bus zoomed by, inches from his face.
Then the light did change and everybody starts walking.
A lady wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates hat, the
person that saved him, smiled and waved.
The film leaves us wondering about the woman who
saved Mack from the bus.
But we get a
very intimate glimpse into Simon's life so that there's no question he's fully
human.
But that's part of the genius of
the film.
Though Mack is a regular guy,
there's something spiritual at work in the way his life intersects with
Mack's.
One of the central themes of
the film is that spirituality happens in the midst of the day-to-day.
The question is whether or not we see it.
We find some of
these same themes in the ancient account of Jacob wrestling with the
angel. The text doesn't really clearly
identify the nature of his adversary. It's become traditional to refer to the incident as Jacob's wrestling
with the angel. The closest it gets to
identifying him at all comes when the mysterious being says to Jacob toward the
end of their long struggle, “You have struggled with God and with men, and
prevailed” (Gen. 32:22).
At first glance
this is one of those strange, ancient Biblical narratives that make you think,
‘What in the world is that all about?' But once we step back and view it in symbolic, mythic terms, it's
surprising how modern the themes really are. Let's start with the broader narrative. You may remember it was Jacob who stole his brother's birthright just
before their father died and ran from home. It was while he was on the run that he had his famous dream of the
ladder connecting heaven and Earth, with angels descending and ascending. The nightlong wrestling match takes place
many years later, while Jacob is on his way back to reunite with his
brother. And if we fast-forward the
narrative we get to the story of Jacob's son Joseph, he's the one who gets the
beautiful, multi-colored coat whose dreams are to have a profound impact
Jacob's life and the fate of his people. So Jacob has a young man's dream early on, then a mid-life experience of
self-confrontation, and then later on in life his spirituality is interwoven
with the adventures of his children. Taken together we're being given a model of spirituality that spreads
out its developmental stages over an entire lifespan. So one of the main
lessons here is that wherever you are in your life's journey, there are
spiritual dimensions to be seen and cultivated.
But what about
these angels? One tendency, of course,
is to dismiss them as simple superstition, part of the religious worldview that
we've long outgrown. But to leave it at
that deprives us of the deeper meaning of mythic material.
Walter Wink has
written about the angels in Revelations, noting that the messages John received
on the Island of Patmos were to be given not to the individual churches
mentioned, but to the angel of each church. Wink suggests that this is mythological language for something we all
know: that each institution has a spirit, an ethos that sums up something
greater than the sum of its parts. I
said to Chuck the other day that I picture the angel of Christ Church wearing
sunglasses, you know, he'd just be a rebel somehow, I know it.
In addition to the
notion of institutional personalities we have the even more down to earth way
of saying that “so and so is a real angel of a person,” meaning that they're
caring or compassionate or helpful.
You also see the
angelic invoked metaphorically, as when Abraham Lincoln, prior to the start of
the Civil War, urged people to call on the better angels of their natures.
While I don't have
a problem with any of these modern renderings of angels, I do feel like they
all leave something to be desired. There's something in Jacob's encounter, for example, that speaks to me
of a struggle with either a spiritual being or some psychological aspect of
himself. And this clearly is one of the
ways angels have functioned throughout religious literature: as transitional
figures calling us toward deeper levels of spirituality.
Over and
over again angels appear as mediators between God's word and the prophet who
receives it. We saw that in today's
opening verses of Revelations, though the threshold figure here is the
mysterious “Son of Man,” not angel. Bu
the same process is at work. It's as if
an unmediated vision of the spiritual realm would be too much, so it gets
filtered through the a threshold figure.
Interestingly
enough, there are modern examples of this kind of thing. Take “The Prophet,” a poem by the Russian
poet, Pushkin. You get the feeling the
material he's working with is so charged it threatens to overpower him and yet
he opens to it.
Parched with the spirit's thirst, I crossed
An
endless desert sunk in gloom,
And
a six-winged seraph came
Where
the tracks met and I stood lost.
Fingers
light as dream he laid upon my lids; I opened wide
My
eagle eyes, and gazed around.
He
laid his fingers on my ears
And
they were filled with roaring sound:
I
heard the music of the spheres,
The
flight of angels through the skies,
…With
his bright sword he split my breast;
My
heart lept to him with a bound;
A
glowing livid coal he pressed
Into
the hollow of the wound.
There
in the desert I lay dead,
And
God called out to me and said;
“Rise,
prophet, rise, and hear and see….
The German poet,
Rilke, also had a habit of invoking the angels. Many of you have become familiar with Rilke through the prayer
chain, where we often use a few lines gleaned from some of his poetry in our
prayers. Those poems are mostly from
his Book of Hours, one of his earliest works. But his crowning achievement as an artist came in the form of his Duino
Elegies, ten poems of blazing revelation. I'll simply read a few of the first lines, which came to him with such
force he likened the experience to John on the island of Patmos writing
Revelations.[1] Rilke begins the first of the ten elegies:
Who, if I cried out, would hear
me among the angels'
hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I
would be consumed
in that overwhelming
existence. …Every angel is terrifying.[2]
Both Pushkin and Rilke use the spiritual fierceness
of the angels to convey something essential about life's roaring and uprushing
vitality. These are dimensions of life
that we tend to shield ourselves from due to their intensity. This is another obstacle to
spirituality. At the one hand we have
the secularization of life that leaves everything feeling prosaic and
mundane. On the other extreme we have
the sheer intensity of the spiritual dimension which threatens to overwhelm
us. So we leave it to the poets and the
saints to open themselves to God and tells us what it's like. But the lesson of Jacob reminds us that
encounters with our better angels aren't reserved for poets and saints. Every day people like Mack the immigration
lawyer and Simon the tow-truck driver and Jacob, the guy running from his angry
brother, find themselves in a spiritual universe, as do we.
And that brings up
one other intriguing twist to this subject of angels that I'd like to touch on
this morning, the idea that there's something about human existence that tempts
angels to leave their lofty perches in search of passion and a lived, embodied
existence. Maybe you saw the movie Michael
with John Travolta, which takes up the subject with Pulp Fiction like
playfulness. But the all-time classic
in this regard is a German film which birthed all the subsequent copy-cat
versions, that's the Wim Wenders film, Wings of Desire.
The movie starts
out entirely from the perspective of angels and does a masterful job of
depicting spiritual creatures who have existed since before the appearance of
human beings and the million years on afterwards. The setting is a modern German City with all of its daily dramas,
which, true to form, are mostly private and anonymous. But the angels can hear people's thoughts,
so there are some wonderful montages in which you get intimate glimpse after
intimate glimpse of what people are thinking as they ride the subway or stare
out a window at home.
There are a few
wonderful scenes shot in a library with all the patrons cordoned off in their
own little spaces, reading. The camera
pans back and you see angels all over, comforting and consoling people who don't
even know the angels are there. It's a
nice touch that the only people who can see the angels are kids. An angel will be walking down the isle of a
train and to everyone else they're invisible, but kids look up and see them and
smile and the angels wave and smile back.
As cute as those
kinds of details are, this is a dark and artsy film, which makes it all the
more strange to see Peter Falk in it. Yeah that's right, the guy who played Columbo. He plays himself in a film within the film, so he's there in
Germany as an American actor. At one
point he's walking across a vacant lot in an industrial neighborhood and a
group of German teenagers walk past him. One of them says, “Hey, I think that was Columbo.” And the rest of the group says, “No, no
way.”
As the plot
develops you see that one of the angels is more and more fascinated by the
emobodied lives of the people he's comforting. He gets curious about the taste of coffee and the simple things about
life he has never experienced. At one
point he's standing at a little coffee and donut kiosk that Columbo—or Peter
Falk—has wandered over to. Falk senses
something and startles the angel by addressing him, “I can't see you,” he says,
“But I know you're there.” Then he
starts talking about the pleasures of a hot cup of coffee or the feel of
rubbing your hands together.
Eventually the
angel takes the plunge and wills himself to become human. Suddenly the film, which until this point
has been shot in black and white, changes to color, as if to express the new
mode of existence. The angel hocks his
metal breastplate at a pawn shop and buys some hideous clothes—he hasn't had
much practice dealing with color, and takes off in pursuit of a trapeze artist
he has fallen in love with. But while
searching for her he stumbles across the set of the film that Falk is in. Falk, sensing he's the angel he had talked
to earlier, walks over to the fence.
Falk reveals that
he, too, had been an angel, which explains his uncanny way of sensing when
one's around. They talk briefly but get
interrupted when they call for Falk to shoot a scene. The newly human former angel says, “Wait, I have so much more to
ask you.” At which point Falk yells back
to him over his shoulder, “Some things are best learned on your own, through
experience.”
Whether we
begin with the human condition and reach toward the angels as lofty spiritual
ideals and mediating figures, or begin with them and work back down into the
human condition the message is the same. Life is far more mysterious and sacred then we normally realize. May your journeys take you deeper into those
mysteries.
Amen.
[1] Gass,
William. Reading Rilke, p. 103.
[2] As found in
Stephen Mitchell's, A Head of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of
Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: The Modern Library, 1995).
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