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Reflection for Date November 19, 2006

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Ta! Ta!

Besides the archangel Michael (mentioned in today's first reading) Christian tradition recognizes the archangel Gabriel as the herald whose trumpet call (as mentioned in one of St. Paul's letters) will signal the end of the world. But do we have to wait until that seemingly distant moment to hear Gabriel's trumpet call? Doesn't it reach us - if ever so faintly - at all those moments in our lives when we awake to something captivating - to an insight, for example, which becomes a milestone in our lives?

I can remember hearing that trumpet way back in my childhood. Of course I was conditioned to do so, living as I did in a grim neighborhood of brick row houses and a skyline punctuated only by factories and warehouses (many of them empty during the Great Depression). It was a world similar to Coketown in Dickens's novel Hard Times: "a town of machinery and tall chimneys out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed . . .where what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchasable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not and never should be, world without end. Amen." In other words commerce superseded religion.

And then one day when I was seven a relative gave me a small book entitled: Lives of the Saints. I opened it to find a picture of St. James on one page and an account of his life on the other. There he was with brown beard, blue eyes, wearing a blue robe, holding a staff, feet shod with sandals. And then there were images of Sts. Jude, John, Paul, Cecelia, Agnes, Francis - some looking quite sober, others smiling, but all with a far away look in their eyes. And I thought, "There's something different about these people, something true. They see something I don't see - and want to see." And - Ta! Ta! - I thought I heard a sound descending from above or behind me. Gabriel's trumpet!?

And then there was the neighborhood church, gothic in style, a treat to the eyes considering all the eyesores around me. Inside that chamber I came upon the same placid saints of my book distributed throughout the place on pedestals whence they looked down upon me with the same summoning eyes. There also I found Gospel stories enacted in windows of blue and red and yellow; frightened disciples in a storm tossed boat and Jesus standing in their midst; little children gathering around the knees of Jesus; Jesus summoning a pallid Lazarus out of his tomb. All bathed me in their light. There was something wonderful about this place. And there again was that sound: Ta! Ta!

Then later I entered a high school run by the Christian brothers. They were tough customers motivated by something other than self-preservation, something expressed in large golden letters around an arch in their baroque chapel. It was a line from our first reading for today and when I first looked up, Gabriel's horn sounded again. It read: "Those who instruct many unto justice shall shine as stars for all eternity." Whatever it meant, it made a permanent impression on me: to shine like a star for all eternity.

We associate Gabriel's trumpet with the end of the world. But as you can see, worlds end every time we are inspired to question the limitations of the common sense world around us - every time we begin to believe there is more to life than achieving material security - every time we become convinced that our primary reason for existing is to become a saint, that is, a big hearted, hopeful, irrepressibly forgiving and sociable human being - in other words, a poet in the deepest sense of the word. Whenever that happens, the immature world around us begins to crumble ever so much and Jesus (representing an ultimately humane humanity) begins to appear if ever so faintly upon the horizon. The end of the world is not something distant in time. It happens to us every time we hear Gabriel blow his horn.

An old one, revised

-- Geoff Wood