The trouble with angels

There are Christmas songs I like, and Christmas songs I loathe (so far this year I’ve been able to escape the irksome to the point of making my skin crawl, The Little Drummer Boy). Particular favorites of mine are those seasonal pieces decked in clerical garb. While I’m not particularly churchy, I think religious inspiration should be the motivating creative force in a song about Christmas.

Sitting in a Starbucks this morning (that wasn’t a plug, but if the SB people want to give me free Americanos for the rest of my life thanks to my reference, that’s OK with me) I heard, aside from the Charlie Brown Christmas theme music (love that Vince Guaraldi) was Hark the Herald Angels. It was a choral version, as it should be.

I recall when I was a very young child that I thought the song was about an angel called Harold. You know, you had Gabriel and Michael, and Maybe Harold, all wing-bedecked, sitting next to God.

That led me to thinking about angels in general. Not only how many could sit on the head of a pin, but also about popular misconceptions about angels. For example, you have the ever-popular (and deservedly so) film It’s a Wonderful Life. Aside from Jimmy Stewart, and the wonderfully adorable Donna Reed, there is good old Lionel Barrymore – “You’ll rue the day, George Bailey!” And, there is Clarence the angel who doesn’t yet have his wings. Cute. But, the problem is, Clarence is a violation of scriptural tenets.

Children, because they are confused and nonplused by death (ain’t we all?) are benevolently told, if say a grandmother has died, that she has gone to Heaven and become and angel who will watch over grieving grandchild. Therefore, kids grow up thinking that if you are really good, that when you die you will become and angel.

Only problem is, that is not what Christian doctrine (or Islamic or Jewish doctrine) suggests. It’s certainly not in the Bible. The scriptural view on the matter is that God created everything, included human beings, beasts of the field, etc. as well as angels. Angels were simply another order of creation. They were never human. Furthermore, and this confounded medieval and renaissance artists, they were neither male nor female. So, if you give a girl angel boobs or any angel a belly button, you are sort of denying how they came about.

My second wife still held to the theory that angels were ‘late’ human beings, and she grew remarkably indignant at my suggestions to the contrary. Mind you, she grew remarkably indignant about many things I ran past her. Anyway, she was content to stick with her view of the celestial situation.

We also assume that angels are pretty, well, ‘angelic’ creatures. That was definitely not always the case. Satan, for example, was an archangel, which sat him right up there alongside the aforementioned Gabriel and Michael (and maybe Harold). Then, when things weren’t working out at the office for this ruthlessly ambitious Young Turk , when he wasn’t getting ahead like he thought he should, he staged a palace revolt. God was thoroughly pissed and kicked him out, and that was how he became the Prince of Darkness. I know that is so because I’ve read my Paradise Lost.

Gabriel too had his cranky moments, and sometimes God (especially Old Testament God, who was much stricter than New Testament God) sent his angels to do His dirty work, kind of like Seraphic hitmen. Unlike that damn (literally) old Satan, they knew to obey and do what it took.

Thus endeth my little theological musing in this Christmas season.