Angels can fly, of course, but did you know that they can’t walk? They never experience what it’s like to lose their balance, or to trip, or to have to get up from a stumble to the ground. They never fall, a scenario that is all too familiar to us.
This insight is not original with me. It came from a rabbi and Jewish scholar, drawing from the book of Ezekiel. Right in the first chapter, the rabbi pointed out, we read the description of the angels that appeared to the prophet. The angels emerged from a cloud: “Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot; and they sparkled like burnished bronze” (Ezekiel 1:7).
Their legs were straight. Stiff, no bending knees. For a winged creature, this is hardly a problem. Angels can indeed move around in the air, flying in all directions. Albeit never to face the embarrassment of a misstep, or the misery of a more serious accident involving bone breaks or sprains, casts or surgery, or just big ugly bruises.
I heard the rabbi’s talk in a Zoom session I’d joined, and alas, I was in a bit of discomfort myself while I considered what he said.
A couple of days earlier, I had been sitting on the sofa at a friend’s apartment, seeking isolation while he was away. My family were all quarantining at home with Covid. Our son, Will, his wife, Karen, and their six-month-old, Ricky, had flown out from California for a week-long visit that had to be extended when they all tested positive, as did my wife, Carol.
Fortunately, their cases were mild. Carol had a fever for 24 hours, and Karen felt kind of achy. Will had cold-like symptoms, and baby Ricky was uncharacteristically fussy. They got well enough so that we could gather outside, distanced and masked, but until they all tested negative it seemed best for me—who never tested positive—to stay elsewhere.
Hence, I wasn’t sitting in my usual prayer place, the lumpy sofa at home, that Saturday morning when I closed my eyes on my friend’s couch and sought the presence of God. As always, there were distractions in the silence, worries about family, friends, the world. Troubling thoughts I practiced putting in God’s hands.
At the end of my meditation, I stood up from the sofa. Too fast, apparently. I felt dizzy and disoriented in the unfamiliar setting, not knowing what to reach for to steady myself while I regained my balance. I tripped on the rug, over the coffee table, and landed on my face. My nose was bleeding, either from clipping a chair on the way down or smacking my nose flat against the floor when I landed. I managed to grab a roll of paper towels from the kitchen, and I sat in a chair for a long while till the nosebleed stopped. Oddly enough, neither my nose nor my face hurt. My back did—I must have twisted it going down—and so did the swollen middle finger of my left hand. I guess I’d tried to catch myself. My body was as bruised as my ego.
Later in the day, I met up with the family for a distanced walk and sheepishly explained myself. I looked a mess, with shiners now showing around my eyes, but I assured everyone I wasn’t in any terrible pain. “At least I didn’t break any teeth,” I said, trying to make light of the silly accident. I promised to put in a call to my doctor as soon as the weekend was over.
It was while waiting for the doctor’s call back that I happened to catch the rabbi’s Zoom lecture on angels, those beings who could neither walk nor fall. I struggled to find some comfort from it until my cell phone rang. The medical assistant relayed a message from my doctor: “You must go to the E.R. right away to make sure nothing is broken,” she said.
I was close enough to get there on my own two feet, and walked—something, I’d just learned from the good rabbi, that angels couldn’t do. The E.R. staff did a CT scan of my face and took X-rays of my back and finger. Nothing broken on the latter; as for the nose, two small fractures. I had to see an ENT.
I dragged myself to yet another medical setting, annoyed that I’d brought the whole ordeal upon myself. The ENT explained why the nose didn’t need to be reset. Unlike an arm or leg with movement, the nose stays in place. The bones would heal in time, and the shiners would fade like my other bruises. But what about my ego? I wanted to ask.
On the walk back to my friend’s place, I kept thinking of what the rabbi had said. Didn’t I have two legs that moved gracefully enough, that took me running up and around the hills most mornings, that raced up and down stairs, that carried me on walks with my family? Wasn’t there angelic reassurance in that? Maybe angels didn’t know what it was like to take a spill like a klutz—like a human—but they offered other gifts. They sang from the heavens when Christ was born. They comforted him when he was tempted in the wilderness. And they, who never stumble, came to my aid consistently, whether I was healing from a physical fall or a temporary fall from God’s grace. I didn’t ever have to heal on my own.
By the time you read this, my nose will be fine. No doubt there will have been plenty of other reasons for me to seek comfort after a misstep. That’s our fate as humans. We fall from time to time. And rise again, with help from the winged creatures whose feet never touch the ground.
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