Now if I had the wings of an angel /
Over these prison walls I would fly . . .
Among the participants at a lecture I delivered one day on the Sunday Lectionary Readings was a young man who asked if angels really had wings. Obviously he took the Bible literally and wondered how in the Book of Genesis the patriarch Jacob could wrestle with what popular tradition has described as an angel. I sighed. Answering such a question generates almost another lecture to no avail; indeed requires a basic introduction to the Bible as a whole (which wouldn’t be a bad idea).
Which reminds me of a story by the Latin American writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez titled: A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. It’s a kind of fantasy tale. We’ve got this coastal village that has endured a three-day storm and is infested with crabs crawling everywhere, even inside houses. It keeps a husband and wife, Pelayo and Elisenda, busy driving them off their property. In the process they find entangled in the mud of their backyard an old man, bald, dressed like a rag-picker, almost toothless – not very appealing, especially since he had a pair of dirty, buzzard like wings. A neighbor says, “He’s an angel.”
The poor thing is hardly alive. Yet upon his arrival the parents’ seriously ill child begins to recover. The couple encloses the old winged thing in their chicken coop and try to feed it. It speaks an incomprehensible dialect. They summon Father Gonzaga who thinks the wretched creature fails to measure up to the angelic standards of the Church; he is too filthy, his wings are full of parasites, he smells bad, he could be the devil. At any rate he will refer the matter to Rome for an answer. As I read it Rome raised questions as to whether the creature had a navel, if his dialect had any connection to Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just a Norwegian with wings. No help from that quarter.
However, given the mystery of the captive, Pelayo and Elisenda began to benefit from his presence. People came from everywhere and paid to see him, to set up candles, to feed him mothballs (angel food?). Soon the couple had lots of money, remodeled their house; Elisenda wore silk on Sunday, Father Gonzaga was cured of his insomnia. And then there were odd miracles, like the blind man who remained blind but grew three new teeth, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers??? Eventually the old man with wings recovered his strength and slowly but surely managed to fly off. Elisenda kept watching him until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because he was . . . but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.
Of course there is no doubt that this old winged angel was imaginary, because he is the product of a story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But the little miracles or unanticipated turns of fate recorded in the story do correspond to real things that happen in our lives. Like I was minding my own business as a high school freshman when I picked up a brochure illustrating monastic life at a place called Graymoor. Or at age 27 I was fed up with academic life, when superiors I hardly knew ordered me to pursue advanced biblical studies – even to Rome. Or then one day at age 40 I stood looking into a bassinet at a son too beautiful to be mine! Unanticipated turning points! You could find countless numbers of them if you surveyed your own life. Winged moments, not visibly and not always grand, but similar to the angelic appearances of the Old Testament and the winged annunciations of the New; and the magical experience of Pelayo and Elisenda!