Angels

In an early Torah portion the story relates that while Abraham is recovering from circumcision, he is visited by three angels to whom even in his pain and discomfort he gives rest and sustenance. Abraham washes their feet and helps them to lie down to rest. Abraham tells his wife Sarah to prepare a wonderful meal of the choicest veal and the finest bread for the visitors. When they depart and say that they will return in one year and announce that in that time Sarah will have a child. Abraham is ninety-nine years old and Sarah in her nineties as well. These angels are very good.

In each of two later Torah portions Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, is visited by an angel. In the first meeting Jacob has had a dream. In it “a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it.” And standing beside Jacob was God, thugh I am thinking it was an angel,  who promised Jacob that God will be with him and protect him wherever he would go and that the land promised to Abraham and Isaac would, indeed, become his. When Jacob awoke from the dream he said, “Surely the Lord was in this place, and I did not know it!” In the second meeting Jacob sends his family across the Jabbok and he was left alone. “And a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When [the man] saw that he had not prevailed against Jacob, he wrenched Jacob’s hip at it socket, so that the socket of his hip was strained as he wrestled with him. But when the man asked to be released, Jacob refused until the man blessed him. And the man said, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human and have prevailed.” This second meeting too was with an angel. Jacob’s meeting with angels have comforted and directed him.

I’ve been thinking of late about angels. My friend George called last evening. I do not hear often from him—he lives better than half the year in Arizona and when he was in Saint Paul recently there had been difficulties and we did not spend much time together. But last night he called. He had followed the weather forecasts and grew concerned about me in the cold and snow. Now, I have lived in the Midwest for thirty-five years and have very well adjusted to the weather, and though I have less tolerance now than when first I arrived here, I told George that I knew how to care for myself during the freezing weather. But, I said, his concern touched me. 

Perhaps his call was about more than the weather. And in our conversation that did range over several topics, he told me this story. George has serious medical conditions that trouble him. One recent day he had ridden out on his electric bicycle for a twelve-mile ride. George is a regular bike rider, but he suffers from macular degeneration, a condition that blurs central vision. Macular degeneration causes blurred or no vision in the center of vision; he experiences distorted lines, decreased color intensity, dark or empty areas in the field of vision. Macular degeneration is a condition incurable and degenerative: it can only get worse. George can no longer drive and despite being an intellectual can no longer read books or the newspapers. George continued his story:  recently he had taken a fall getting off of his bicycle and seriously hurt his shoulder. The pain was becoming difficult to tolerate. His orthopedic doctor advised George that without surgery he actually could live with the shoulder injury for the rest of his life experiencing pain that might at times be acute. Or, the doctor suggested, George could have surgery to repair the shoulder. George is eighty-two years old and was conflicted what path he should choose.  

Halfway through his ride George stopped for a rest and parking his bicycle he sat on a nearby bench. In a little while another bike rider on a standard non-electric bicycle asked if he might share the bench. “Sure,” said George. The two men began to talk and the man revealed that he also suffered macular degeneration, that he too had hurt both his shoulders and had undergone two shoulder reconstructions. He also revealed that he had two knees replaced. He said also that he was ninety-seven years old. 

George’s face must have lit up as the man’s talk offered strength and paths for George to take. George had met with his angel. He decided there that he going to have the surgery on his shoulder, that he was going to live through his macular degenerative eyes and that he was going to continue to ride his bicycle until he turned at least ninety-seven years old and maybe one hundred. His angel had blessed George. 

When the phone rang with George’s call, I was sitting before the fire on a cold and dark evening feeling sorry enough for myself. I am seventy-seven years old and suffer from a few medical conditions that probably won’t kill me but from which I complainingly suffer. I have just published a memoir entitled Anxious Am I. Enough said about its subject! Now, I have a daughter getting married in two weeks, and I know that it will be a happy occasion. But I have been experiencing vague anxieties regarding this change in family status that her marriage exposes for me to consider. I think I was feeling that the intact family in which I had lived for thirty years despite divorce was now to be somehow changed. No matter that we all get excellently along; no matter that the circle simply, even happily would widen;  nevertheless, the circle would be transformed. I was experiencing that change anxiously. I did not discuss this issue with George. But our forty minute wide ranging conversation comforted me; by the fact that he had thought of me enough to be concerned for my welfare; by his willingness to share some intimacy with me and listen to some of my issues.

When I ended the call I knew that I had met my angel. It was a rare and meaningful event. And it would be sufficient. We can wrestle with ourselves and hold on tightly to our anxieties and our troubles until we receive from the angel our blessing. We have to only realize that it is an angel with whom we are struggling.