Submitted by rlp on Thu, 03/27/2008 - 15:02.
An angel came to me while I was laboring at prayer. Yes, laboring. That is likely a problem itself, but we’ll leave that for another day. I was in the woods near the church, fingering my way through my rosary. Ten beads for the Shema, ten for people in our church, ten for this, ten for that. My mind was filled with the numerous categories of language. People placed into one group or another. Actions lumped together and called by a single name. Everything classified not only by type, but also called sacred or secular, good or bad. Joy, pleasure, pain, heaven, hell, things done and things left undone. All of these were in my mind.
While I worked my way from bead to bead I noticed, with a start, that an angel was sitting across from me. It looked at me with a pleasant smile. I stood up, respectfully.
“Greetings,” the angel said.
What exactly do you say to angel? Is there a protocol for this? Not knowing what to say, I said nothing at all.
“Mortal, scoop up a handful of what covers that path.”
I reached to the earth, eyes still on the angel, and grabbed at whatever lay at my feet.
“Now open your palm and blow on it.”
I did, and an assortment of leaves and bits of plant floated away.
“What would you call what is left in your hand?”
“Grit maybe? Gravel?”
“Grit and gravel?” the angel said indignantly. “Each particle in your hand has a unique history, and all of their histories are older than the oldest memories of humankind. Each one has a name. Did you know that?”
I brought my palm close to my eyes to look at what lay there. Wanting to say something in keeping with the angel’s attitude toward my handful of gravel, I said, “The pinkish one is nice.”
“Sit down mortal, and I will tell you a truth.”
I sat on the ground and looked up at the angel.
“What need has God for categories? Why sort and catalog a collection when you know and can describe every individual item? What meaning do your base labels have for a higher mind? You have created categories for your own use, fallen in love with sorting them, and made a god of the whole affair. This is an idolatry of the highest order. It is a blasphemy so bold as to cause angels to tremble. ‘The mind of The Almighty,’ you say, ‘is like unto my own mind.’”
“God is on intimate terms with the simple matter of earth, yet you dare label people instead of trying to know them. Your precious divisions of nationality, of Christian and non-Christian, saved and damned, good and evil, slave and free. These convenient memory aids might have served you well when you were biting spiritual ankles and wrestling with your primers. Will you not set them aside even now?”
“For the Lord God, the Mysterious, the Creator of all things, is one who knows the hearts of people. And when time draws to a close, there will be no labels or records. There will be no flags, no Bibles, no creeds, no clothing, no wealth or distinction. There will be nothing but vision, straight and true. A mind that will peer into your heart and know you inside and out.”
“There will be no hiding on that day.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
The angel smiled. “In truth, you are a human being and can be no more than that. Labels and categories are all that you know. Go in peace and understand the world in the ways you can. But know this greater truth. And knowing it, let humility settle upon you like the gentle aging of a righteous man.”
rlp
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Amen, my brother. Pascale's
Amen, my brother.
Pascale's Wager
Well said. Funny that he
Well said.
Funny that he calls you "mortal".
Awesome. Frickin' awesome.
Awesome. Frickin' awesome. THAT should be required reading for everyone on this stoopid planet.
I don't have words,
I don't have words, Preacher. I wept. Thank you so much.
Kierkegaard said, "Once you
Kierkegaard said, "Once you label me, you negate me"
Down with the
Down with the categories!
I've never liked categories (my husband calls me a rebel without a cause), but in the past year or so I've realized how much damage we do with the terms "conservative" and "liberal." Beside the fact that we don't feel like we need to have conversation with someone in the opposite category (because, obviously, they can't have a reasonable conversation), but those categories themselves have become meaningless. What do you do with a Methodist who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture and is egalitarian? Traditional categories are being swapped up, jostled, and mixed.
Down with.... what?
'Traditional categories are being swapped up, jostled, and mixed.'
Welcome to postmodernism! Down with categories, cos whatever fancy words we use, really we're still just dividing 'us' from 'them', my kind of people from the other kind. Ok, I agree so far.
But how do you get your mortal, human head around there being six and a half billion of 'us'? Six and a half billion 'us', that God made different, but also kind of alike, in all sorts of ways?
My fiance and I are the closest, most intimate 'us' I know. And sometimes he is still wonderfully 'other'. And sometimes the labels help us see the joy in that. Yeah, I'm the messy one. When his normally immaculate kitchen is covered in flour and chocolate, and he calls me 'Mrs Messy', he's saying 'Well, that's not how I would have done it, but that's how you've done it, and that's ok'.
I wonder if it might be possible to use categories in a more constructive way. Maybe it's not so much 'down with catagories' but 'down with using them to assign value to human beings'.
Reminds me
Reminds me a bit of the old H.G.Wells short story "A Vision of Judgment" (http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/2880/ , since it is now in public domain)
Yeah, yeah I know, Wells copped out in the last few lines or did he? But his conception of a God who could be loving, even amused, while still being a pretty fair judge, is rather well drawn, don'cha think?
No one has asked this yet,
No one has asked this yet, so maybe Im being very silly, but... Is it a true story Gordon?
can't you tell?
isn't obvious when a thing is true? Can't you feel it?
I know its a silly question.
I know its a silly question. I suppose I meant true in a more or less literal sense, but I was too embarassed to say that.
Please don't be embarassed.
Please don't be embarassed. It's magical to think that a person could have an angel visit. You've got a beautiful mind.
This is the most honest answer I can give:
I don't know if it is true in a literal sense. I can't remember.
I mean, what if you were sitting around in the woods, thumbing your way along a rosary and you became enamored with the grit and rocks on the ground? And then what if you remembered what Annie Dillard said about sand in her last non-fiction book, "For the time being." Every grain of sand takes a million years to form as it is polished along rivers from the tops of mountains. Why would that pop into your head?
And then what if you suddenly started thinking about a mind that could comprehend how special every grain of sand is, each with its own mountain and river and journey.
And what if that happened, say, two years ago and you kept thinking you were going to write about it and by the time you did you really couldn't remember exactly what happened out there in the woods?
So what would you call that? Angel visit? It's as good an explanation as any. ;-)
absoloutley
absoloutley
history:
I never thought about all the little pieces of grit and gravel having an older history than humanity. Whoa!
joshua
It gets better. The atoms
It gets better. The atoms each one of us is built of are incomparably older than we are. We are kin to the grit and the gravel - formed of the dust of the ground, indeed. We are dust that thinks, and seeks, and loves, and our inner essence was forged in the heart of an ancient star.
Beautiful.
Thanks preacher. This is beautiful.
I wonder how understanding this would shape not only our view of humanity, but of creation as a whole? I'm reminded of Robert Ferrar Capon's "Supper of the Lamb" where a chapter is devoted to encountering an onion. Does everything become sacrament?
Human / Understanding
"In truth, you are a human being and can do no more than that." (At first I wanted to argue this point.)
"Go in peace and understand the world in ways you can."
After thinking about this for a few moments I realized it is brilliant..."understand the world in ways you can."...splended.
In keeping with Buechner:
In keeping with Buechner: “The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.”
awesome
I really liked this one. For some reason, I don't read the short stories you write, but I read this one. It was really interesting.
modernity
see, even the angels are spurring you on towards post-modernity :)
I'll miss all you guys while i'm gone.
peace and carrots,
paul at soupablog
I seem to remember Carl
I seem to remember Carl Sagan: "We are starstuff".
Beautiful! Like a sudden
Beautiful! Like a sudden vision of what is and its preciousness. Like remembering a treasured forgotten memory, remembering something on the edge of consciousness.
Thank you
Sheep & Goats
There are two types of people... those who categorize and those who don't. ;-)
Didn't Jesus divide people up into "sheep" and "goats"?
Even I don't always log in.
Even I don't always log in. ;-)
Yes. There is no other way for the human mind to think about the world. But that doesn't mean it's right or in any way lines up with some objective reality. We're the ones who need to group things so that we can talk about them.
Whenever someone says
Whenever someone says categorization is simply how humans interpret the world, I agree... but I hedge. I think there's also an innate ability to say "I don't know" that often serves us better, when we can manage it.
And my mind also goes immediately to people I've known who (just by nature) don't distinguish between things as much as others. Often, that's a liability--I'm thinking in particular of someone who doesn't differentiate sleeping time from waking time, or dating someone from not dating them, and of the complications those blurred lines have caused--but it also seemed maybe more realistic in some ways... or at least more free of conventions.
thanks...
i'm tempted to scrap everything and just teach on this tomorrow...helpful parable.
"A mind that will peer into
"A mind that will peer into your heart and know you inside and out.”
Powerful!
I agree with what the angel
I agree with what the angel says about old dirt and such. After reading this, I'm left with the sense that I've been taught something profound, but that is always irrevocably out of my reach.
Let me see if I've understood this. The angel says you're stuck in a backwards way of looking at creation. There is more to the story. Here it is, but don't think you can ever get there. You're a mortal who necessarily sees via catagories and distinctions. Now learn to live with it.
It strikes me as a bit cruel.
Oh, to me it is so graceful
Oh, to me it is so graceful and hopeful. Look, you and I both know that our human perspective is limited, right? We can't even comprehend the size of our earth, much less the size of our universe and galaxy. And we are absolutely forbidden from seeing anything on the other side of the galaxy because of our inability to deal with the speed of light.
So the angel just hints that there is more to be known. But not to worry or feel badly about our limitations. Perhaps in another life there is a new level of understanding for us.
This is only cruel if this life is all we have AND a person somehow was not aware of the limitations of human knowledge and understanding.
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