The Angel said "Freedom"

I can’t help but marvel at the self-serving qualities we see on display from our elected officials all the way down to our alleged unbiased reporters – and even some of our own fellow citizens.

It would seem those of us who live our lives day to day – simply hoping that we’ll make it to the next paycheck – we’re just not even remotely important to these people. Those of us just trying to do the best for the ones we love, in the face of the plain truth that there is no way to pay for the anniversary trip, a small vacation, a dinner out – or anything at all – we are left with wishes and hopes alone, while the Washington players live their elitist dreams and engage in their political games.

Only, it stopped being a game. Don’t know if anyone noticed that.

It’s gone beyond the game stage, with silly email lists and press conference dancing and has stepped firmly into reality – because where government bureaucrats begin to endanger the lives of families – of regular people, they put themselves on a very different kind of list.

But isn’t it strange how quick we all are to make those lists – to draw line after line in the sand like we’re living some John Wayne flashback. And none of it has anything to do with the important stuff. Not really.

I nearly died on a couple occasions - and perhaps for a short time, once - was dead. No big deal out here in the world – an angry mob in a third world country – a massive pulmonary embolism in my living room twenty years later. Both should have produced a similar result – some ashes; a short service – maybe a headstone if I was lucky.

In the end, just fading memory – the fate of us all.

But I survived both times, and I saw things I can’t explain. Impossible things. The truth is out there and it is real. It stretches the boundaries of the term profound. It makes our victories , our failures, our silly games seem small. It shows with a light brighter than anything you’ve ever seen, all the dark places for what they are – shadow-less corners to temporarily lose ourselves – like a child’s game of hide-and-seek which we didn’t remember we were playing.

I’ve known valkaries.
Heard the soft sound of wind through feathers dusted in gold. I’ve felt their gaze – hot beneath a massive sky. Above, the planets turn. Churning great paths through space, trailing moons coated in dust, and ice and mystery.

And I’ve met Angels in the darkness. I’ve felt the butterfly brush of faeries, heard the call of sirens, seen the flash of valkaries, come to bring me home.

I know what is important – the world-spanning compassion I saw in the eyes of an angel one night deep in Africa’s wilderness. The cool blue of the expanding disk of light behind her matched the one I saw years later, as I died in my home – the shapes moving inside of it becoming familiar – people I knew. People already gone from this Earth.

Faith is belief in the absence of proof. I wish I had that. Instead I have a few good visions – memories – amongst my lifetime of night-time bad dreams. A few pearls of actual proof in an unending sea of barren mud.

But it’s enough. So I give them to you – these truths. When everything else is lies and you're standing in the dark places in some future time, you can hold onto this. You can know that one day you read the deepest truths from someone you never really knew - who had seen something incredible – something which, makes all the Earthly lies dry and shrivel and crumble to dust in the brilliance of its' simplicity.

Hope is real – and not just part of some dumb slogan by some forgettable politician.

Truth is real and not something we’ll never really hear or see.

Life is real – and so very delicate and perfect.

And liberty is the combination and expression of all these things – in a single breath, one perfect thought and action - at the right moment, in the right heartbeat of the right person, in unending history.

Freedom.

If the angel had said anything at all to me that night so long ago, I would like to think it would have been “freedom.”



*******



Want the whole story of the angel? - see the post "Angels in the Dark," placed on this blog July 12.