Fairy Wings
Posted: May 1, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized 8 Comments »I’d love to say that it happened somewhere poetic—like while I was driving across the Mojave Desert or on some barren, wave-torn coast in San Francisco, but—truth be told—I don’t remember when it happened, exactly. I just know that when I got back to school the fall after I travelled across the country by bus, I didn’t believe in demons, or Satan, or hell anymore—at least not in the fire-y oblivion and crimson, horned tormentor I’d seen on Flannel grams as a little boy.
More likely than not, it had something to do with the fact that I’d spent the summer traveling to church camps—watching week after week as junior high and high school students rushed to the front of auditoriums to dedicate their lives to Jesus after sermons about salvation and escape left them teary-eyed and vulnerable. Prayers, they were promised, would guarantee them a place in that infamous, holy un-hell, the heaven of movies where God was, and evil was not, and everyone sang and ate and celebrated forever. That, and I read Dostoevsky.
I remember—even in high school—being skeptical about this whole, some-people-just-don’t-make-the-cut bit, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered people who were just as skeptical as I was, and they had Ph.D’s. By my junior year in college, I was certain—and still am—that when we die, no one is sent to burn.
However, what I’ve learned in the years since has been profoundly important for me: demons, it turns out, do exist—not as embodied creatures that struggle with angels in a cosmic battle of good and evil. No, they’re these pernicious little bastards with sharp, tenacious claws, and unforgiving eyes that inhabit our hearts and peer around their corners every so often to remind us of the parts of us that scare us most: our insecurities, our doubts, our shortcomings. When I see them, when I hear their familiar, confident whisper, I am afraid. If I’m not careful, I can plummet, I can plunge, I can spiral without parachute into the depths of hell, which—as it happens—is also real, even though it isn’t a place people go after they die. It’s a place we inhabit all the time: it’s life devoid of purpose, and beauty, life marked by fear and anxiety, life divorced from fierce, forgiving love. We have this language for a reason, because sometimes life is hell, and to call it anything less doesn’t do the torment justice.
The summer after I finished college, I was a nanny for two small children: a four-year old, tawny-haired girl who made mud pies in the backyard, and whose prized doll was named Rainbow Sparkle Jewel, and her six-month old brother, who—by and large—passed the day strapped to the front of my chest while I washed dishes and swept floors and walked to the park.
I pulled up in front of their house one October morning, and, before making my way to the porch, exhaled one of those pregnant sighs, one that reeked of sadness and heartbreak. I clenched the steering wheel before opening the door and dragging myself to the door. I heard her feet first, raindropping on the hardwood floor from her bedroom at the back of the house.
“Todd!” she screamed from the hallway in front of me. She was wearing her fairy wings that would complete her Halloween costume the next week. “Todd, can you come here? I have something important to tell you,” she said, pulling the air with her arm as she motioned me closer. We met at the couch, and she squeezed my leg as I stood next to her. “Come here” she said, beckoning me to sit, which I did. She pulled my face toward hers with her tiny hands—the ones that still fit inside my palms—and pressed her mouth to my ear.
“I am very excited that you are here,” she whispered.
The demons—well, mine at least—say the same thing every time they show up: “You are not good enough. You will always be alone. You are not worthy. No one wants you here.” The gift, the angel, then, is the gentle reminder of friends, and family, and children that the demons are wrong, that hell isn’t where we have to stay, that our value and worth abounds.
She squeezed my neck and curled up on my lap, her pink-and-green wings rising behind her head.
“Me, too,” I whispered back.
just a friendly reminder…you are amazing…..thank you for sharing your words
Todd,
Addressing your statement: “what I’ve learned in the years since has been profoundly important for me: demons, it turns out, do exist…our insecurities, our doubts, our shortcomings.”
Other than the modern institution know as the “divinity school”, all of which, to some degree or another, shares unorthodox, untraditional views of Christian theology, I am curious where (or from whom) this was learned? It is stated in your well written opinion piece above as fact, and so I am deeply curious from what source(s) it derives from. Are not these relatively new theological constructs that you share not merely an interpretation based on a conceptualization about what we may want our deity to be like? Perhaps we desire to amend or erase certain spiritual paradigms that have not or do not serve us well, that appear unpalatable to the secular, science oriented mind?
If we cannot believe the stories about “demons” or “Hades”, perhaps Jesus was only a good, moral teacher, but not a God? Perhaps “heaven” also does not exist, but is rather a metaphor? Is the whole of the Christian Bible as we know it a metaphor? Are we to simply skim this ancient collection of books, and pick and choose what metaphors we are to apply to our lives? And is it even relevant to the modern world, if we have better, more schooled, more science based intellectuals who seem to have a more reality based grasp on human nature and his/her social and moral motivations?
I guess I am sincerely curious as to how one can determine, once outside of tradition – which includes thousands of years of theological/intellectual commentary, study and debate, that these relatively unconventional interpretations of Christian scripture – what spiritual stories are to be reduced to poetry and myth, and which are not? I am certainly not looking for an online debate here. I am looking for a source (or sources) that you rely upon to determine your theological footing. I would gather there are other Christians, those who share your perspective and those who may not, who would be interested as well. Curious minds want to know.
Thanks!
Peace.
Beautiful….To have an angel on your lap…How ‘special’ r u….?
Another gem! Sharing.
Another gem, sharing. Happy May Day!
Gijo,
I, too, went through this same wrestling of spiritual vs. literal truth, maybe a little later than Todd did, but nonetheless some of the things that were taught to me in my childhood didn’t make a whole lot of sense once the world around me grew. No, I didn’t attend a seminary when I was 16 years old, but the world indeed grew around me and I was faced with certain discrepancies between what was taught in my fundamentalist church and what was taught in the mainline churches.
I don’t think it’s a question of which church is right and which one is wrong, but rather what, indeed, is spiritual truth (truth that we, and all those apostles, prophets, and martyrs of the past, gain through experiencing life that is obviously more than what we can observe scientifically/rationally). If spiritual truth is merely relegated to a set of doctrines (views on “hell,” “heaven,” “demons,” “virgin birth,” “atonement theology,” etc.), our God becomes very small, a god that can be manipulated by humans (many who would just as soon be “God” or at least “God’s vicar”) based on their interpretation of the Scriptures. We all know from history that “holy” wars have resulted from putting God into a “human/finite box.”
Parts of the Bible tell us that humans long before us were on the same spiritual quest that we are on, writing those observations down because they had deep spiritual meaning for them. From those writings we too learn spiritual, not literal, truth which, I believe, is the ultimate purpose of “God’s Word.”
Yes, Jesus, the man, did literally live on this earth and died a literal, horrible death, one that he did not deserve. We, as Christians, interpret his life and death in a hopeful, post-Easter story of resurrection, claiming that same man, Jesus, to be the Christ, a powerful spiritual truth that has given life to the Christian faith for over two millenia. That is the power of the gospel story, a power that can cast out demons/fear/mistrust/inadequacies in his name when we reach out and claim it.
So, no, I did not learn this truth in seminary but in living and observing life itself. Yes, seminary, scholarly writings, collegial dialogue, etc. help affirm those spiritual truths, but it is only in the heart that we can know them for sure.
Really beautiful writing, Todd. I’m constantly finding that the things I learned about “in church” while “growing up” continue to ring true today. But… not quite in the same (small, claustrophobic, limiting) ways I originally thought.
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