Friday, October 2, 2020 Memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels
Take your place on the stairway to heaven
Their angels in heaven
Always look upon the face
Of my heavenly Father.
Jesus smiles as his eyes flash. “Let the little children come.”
We all have stories of rescue and protection that we sometimes attribute to angels. But mostly, speaking for myself, we forget the supernatural part because it so rarely shows itself.
Nonetheless, we have stories. I shared one of Margaret’s a couple days ago. And here is one of mine. I shared it before, here it is again.
This time it was me driving, an old frontless Ford van loaded with a hot air balloon, my friend David, and Dodds the balloonist’s six year old son Justin. After chasing the balloon from the Kutztown Folk Festival to its landing spot, we headed northeast in Pennsylvania to our friends’ warm cozy home in the woods, ready for supper and sleep.
Have you ever in your lifetime
Commanded the morning
And shown the dawn its place for taking hold of the ends of the earth
Until the wicked are shaken from its surface?
Dodds told me the brakes were bad. I was 20 that year, in 1969, and I didn’t really hear him. Nothing bad had ever happened to me. My mother and sister Aunt Mary always said my guardian angels were busy and active, but in those days I was engaged in rejecting my childhood’s religion for the sake of a realistic view of things. That night David and I were talking up a storm. We skirted life’s mysteries to find something else we could be more sure of, something we could wax righteously about.
Have you entered into the sources of the sea
Or walked about in the depths of the abyss?
Have the gates of death been shown to you
Or have you seen the gates of darkness?
On this clear night there was barely any moon. We topped a hill and headed down into the dark, toward a curve. I pushed the brake pedal, then pushed it again, nothing but air. I began to drown. “There’s no brake,” I said quietly to David. I couldn’t breathe.
The van sped up and I tried to swing us left. The tires shrieked. We left the road and sped straight into a large tree. Dead stop, horrible smashing crash, silence. My face rested against the crazed, cracked windshield, steering column pushed into my groin, the wheel shoved up just beneath my chin.
Beside me, David’s door flew open. Justin was thrown forward and his six-year-old head hit the bottom of the visor. He fell out the door, David fell out right behind him and stepped on his arm. He reached down and pulled Justin’s face out of a puddle left from a day-old rain. I heard the screams of my wife, riding in Justin’s parents’ car just ahead of us.
Tell me, if you know
Which is the way to the dwelling place of light?
Where is the abode of darkness
That we may take them to their limits
And set them on their homeward paths?
Mostly I heard simple, dark silence. I looked up into the black maple leaves, which in tomorrow’s morning sun we would find shining autumn red. The others scrambled down the hill, saw wet and twisted metal, broken glass, and ran to catch us all up in their arms.
You have searched me, Lord, and know me
You know when I sit and when I stand
You understand my thoughts from afar.
Where can I go from your spirit?
We helped each other out of the woods and stumbled up the hill onto the road. I saw the stars and looked up at the silent sky, angry at myself for what I’d done, or had not done. I remember screaming, finally, and falling on my knees, inconsolable.
If I go up to the heavens, you are there
If I make my bed in the depths, you are there
If I rise on the wings of the dawn
And settle on the far side of the sea
Even there your hand will guide me.
The night will shine like the day
For darkness is as light to you.
No one was hurt, not really. Justin spent the night in the hospital with a bruised spleen. The rest of us went home and had supper. The next day Dodds rented a trailer and hitch and we pulled the balloon home to Valpo behind his car. Our favorite professor made it to his Tuesday morning philosophy class.
Much later, surviving other crises too, I once again began believing what I’d rejected then.
Bless the Lord, all you angels,
You ministers who do his will.
(Job 38, Psalm 139, Psalm 103, Matthew 18)
#
