Pewter angels

Someone at church gave me an angel, a little pewter baby angel with eyes closed, hands folded, bare feet sticking out the bottom of its little robe. “Oh, no,” I protested, “I am surrounded by living angels all the time.” “That’s ok,” he insisted, “here’s one more.” This person loves me, so I took the angel and put it in my pocket. Imagine. An angel in my pocket.  I rubbed it between my fingers, pondered angels for a while, and promptly lost it. Yesterday someone called me to say they’d found a little pewter angel, and was it mine? The thing haunts me!

The little baby angel unsettles me because it sends me back to when I lived with my Mixtec friends. In Ometepec, one day, a woman came to my door with a saint, a doll made up in bright paint and decked out in little rich clothes. “Do you want to rub your hands on the saint?” she asked, “for luck?”  “Oh, no,” I protested, “I talk to my Father God all the time. I have no need to handle saints.”  If she knew I had cancer, would she be back at my door now, offering me a saint to rub?

These people were just trying to be helpful. I am grateful. But I also wonder at our need as humans to find something to touch when we need luck. Things go wrong and, Mixtec or Dutch, we grab onto some…thing: a virgin, an angel, even a habit of private devotions in the morning to ward off the evils of the day. It just doesn’t work that way. As a Christian, I am not shielded from the stuff that goes wrong, even if I eat right, run two miles a day, and have my devos every morning. I am even a missionary, for goodness sake; does this not spare me? Am I not owed something? No. We bear the filth of our world in our poor breasts. We share the sufferings of Christ. We take up our cross, and this is mine.  “Oh you heavenly creatures out there with your wheels within wheels and your millions of eyes, do your thing, and I’ll do mine, and we’ll serve a living God together, and wonder at painted saints and pewter angels.”