At the “Joyful Time” party she threw last summer, my friend Jacquie gave everyone an angel, to carry with us at all times. I couldn’t figure out how to attach it to my mobile phone, so I hooked it to one of the zipper pulls in my backpack. It’s next to my Aurora pen, which I bought in a pen shop down the street from Primo Levi’s house in Torino. So, in a sense, it’s looking after one of my most treasured possessions, even when it’s not on me.
We
all need angels—whether or not you believe in heavenly creatures, we all need
to know that someone is looking out for us, caring for us. Doesn’t have to be
supernatural or even physically manifested. Just has to be.
One
of my greatest and most constant gratitudes is that I have those presences in
my life—Jacquie’s one of them. Someone who listens with love and makes time for
me. I
And
also—I’m grateful that I can be an angel is other people’s lives. An inept one,
to be sure, but I can listen with love and make time.
So
today’s Advent music is “Angels from the Realms of Glory”, because angels were
all over the Christmas story, from the Annunciation in a house in Nazareth to
the shepherds on the slopes outside Bethlehem and beyond.
It’s a bit of a challenge to find a recording of “Angels” that doesn’t crib off of the music to “Angels We Have Heard on High”; this one should rightly be set to “Regent Square”. And I’m sad to say that the YouTube is infested with arrangements of “Regent Square” by one Dan Forrest, and they just suck. So this rendition by the First Presbyterian Church of Davenport, Iowa, in 2009 is the best I can do.
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