Reflections on the question of the Angel

(The) question of the Angel is a matter of the human heart, and such matters always lie on the far side of reason.  Pascal knew this as well.  In the deep recesses of the human heart, he found that the “heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know.”  When my heart cracked in grief, an angel appeared.  But how do I speak of any of this?  Words which follow the heart are quite different and more difficult that those which come from the mind.  “Tell the truth,” the poet Emily Dickinson enjoins us, “but tell it slant.”  That seems sound advice when trying to speak of the Angel.  In this realm nothing is certain, and everything that I say could also be said the opposite way.  Perhaps that is why there is a hierarchy in the choir of angels.  Maybe those angels who are closest to God are closest to home, and therefore far from us and so indifferent to us, while those nearer to us appear in a different way.

Whether the Angel appears in the guise of splendid indifference or in warming compassion, its presence heralds a crack in our familiar world  In this sense, the poet Rilke is right when he say that every angel is terrible.  Every angel is as terrible as a miracle, a strange testimony to the existence of other realms of being beyond our ordinary mortal concerns; moreover, because they are miracles, they are not at our command.  They come in dreams or in visions or they break through in moments of breakdown.  H.C. Moolenburgh says that ‘angels always wait till the last possible moment.”  They stand, as it were, at the edge of human events, or they wait, perhaps, in the very depths of our sorrows and distress.

So much of our talk about the angels today, however, seems either to forget or disregard the radical otherness of the Angel.  So much of it seems designed to bring the Angel into our human realm, so much of it filled with advice about channelling the angel, often at time with instructions on how to do so, as if there were, or even could be, a twelve step program for evoking an angel.  I do not mean, however, to dismiss these practices.  I mean only to emphasise the radical different of the Angel from us, to leave it in its holy and terrible splendor, to stand in awe before its otherness.  Indeed, I believe that we are spiritually hungry for this sense of radical holy otherness, starving for something other to address the Orphan in us, to respond to the deep and growing sense of homelessness at the core of our broken hearts.  It is this hunger, I believe, which fuels so much of our angel talk today.  But we are also impatient, and so we unwittingly reinforce our spiritual starvation to the degree that we domesticate the Angel to our own needs and concerns.

When the Angel comes, it comes unbidden, and it is we who are addressed, called, challenged, changed.  Despite our impressive technological powers, we can no more manage the Angel’s appearance than we can engineer a miracle.  We cannot even say the Angel’s appearance is a symbol, because in its radical otherness the Angel lies beyond our understanding.  To understand something or someone is to stand under it, to ground it, to give it our support.  If anything, it is the other way around with the Angel.  The Angel grounds us, gives us our place marks the boundary, as it were of our station between itself and Animal of which we are neither.

Roman Romanyshyn : The Soul in Grief : Love Death and Transformation