Christoph Scheffelt, piano
The image of angels in recent popular culture has gotten them all mixed up with the quainter notion of faeries. The Biblical angels were hardly all like Gabriel who delivered the news to Mary that she was going to be the mother of the Savior, they are generally scary to the people they appear to. Even the one who announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds scared them, they "feared a great fear" until the angel told them the glad tidings of great joy.
The angels appearances were generally far from quaint and homey and comforting they marked some of the most momentous occasions in Biblical narrative. Rainer Maria Rilke, in the first Duino Elegy t says "Every angel is horror" all of them mark a major disruption in the givenness of things. The concentration on the typical events of the physical universe in the last several hundred years have bound us to expectations that everything must be reducible to the simplest terms because those have a banal, seemingly all potent universality. But that way of looking at human experience isn't any less blinding to a larger reality than thinking everything is reducible to dollars and cents or what the gods of fashion have deemed you are to wear this year. All of them are a willful narrowing of view out of a willful denial of things which can't be so easily disposed of.
In thinking about the snark I've gotten over the assumption I believe that the story of the Virgin Birth is something that actually happened, it makes sense to me that, given what people are like, how caught up we are in our own narrow vision of things, it would take something of such total uniqueness, something so outside of the bounds of biology and expectation to make a dent in our world. The same thing with thinking about the Resurrection. When the rich man looking up from the flames at Abraham and Lazarus asks to be sent back to witness to his brothers so they won't suffer the same fate, Abraham tells him that they didn't believe Moses and the prophets so they wouldn't believe him. Even after reportedly seeing the miraculous cures, even the Transfiguration, even the followers closest to Jesus lost faith at seeing him crucified and denied him. If I ever do believe in the literal truth of the incarnation, it will be on the basis of it taking something that outrageously audacious to get our attention so we can do the even harder things like giving what money we have to those who won't pay it back, loving our enemies and praying for them... Compared to those, things which even the strongest believers in the literal truth of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection consistently fail to do, believing in an angel being necessary to shake things up is easy. Hard truths can't become real without things being what you don't expect them to be, you've got to get shaken up. I doubt they look like they've got wings and pretty gowns on. I'll bet they look dead serious.
.... Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can
we make use of? Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world.....
Rilke, Duino Elegy One
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