Barking at Angels
Barking at Angels
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan.
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the blead mid-witer
Long ago.
A few years ago, the Blodleian Library published a Christmas card that showed the anunciation to the shepherd—or, rather, to one shepherd, standing on a hillside shielding his eyes from the glory of the herald angel. Beside him, his cheeky dog was doing what good sheepdogs do: barking at the strange intruder. It is not hard to imagine the poor shepherd, in dread and awe of this staggering vision, trying to get the dog to shut up long enough for him to hear what the angelic messenger is saying.
I often wonder if all the fretful, frenetic activity in our lives isn’t a human way of barking at angels, of driving away the signs everywhere around us: signs calling us to stop, to wake up, to receive a new and larger perspective, to pay attention to what is most important in life, to behold the face of God in every ordinary moment. These signs press on us most insistently at the turning of the year when earthly light drains from our lives and we are left wondering in the dark.
The church, from ancient times, recognized the spiritual value of this winter span of darkness and created in it liturgy what we might think of as a three-months-long Night Office, beginning with the Feast of All Saints on the first of November, and ending with Candlemas on the second of February. This season is a vast parabola of prophecy and vision, a liturgical arcing of eternity through the world’s midnight.
The readings—especially those from Isaiah and Revelation—do their best to subvert our perceptions of time and space in order to plunge us into great stillness at the heart of things, the stillness necessary to make space for what is “ever ancient, ever new” to break through the clamor of our minds, to open our hearts to the Beloved, to annunciation, and to fruition. Eternity is our dwelling place even in time, if only we have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the heart to welcome. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts,” cry the seraphs, their voices shaking the foundations even as their ineffable wings fold us into the stillness of God (Isa 6:3).
Only in this stillness can we know eyes are being opened and ears unstopped; the lame are leaping like deer and those once silenced singing for joy; water is springing in the parched wilderness of our pain. Only as we are plunged into the depths of this obscure stillness can we know the wonderful and terrible openings of the seals and the book; the rain of the Just One; the heavens rent by angels ascending and descending; the opening of graves and gifts, of hell and the side of Christ.
From Writing the Icon of the Heart, by Maggie Ross, pages 7 and 8.