angel for a moment

spoke 1

   Did it flow from a connection Henri Nouwen? During his dream, that marvelous night, Nathaniel pondered a bibliographical note.  The note appeared in typeface, and so I am in the felicitous position of being able to show you the reader a picture of almost exactly what he saw:

Journey of Angels

(forthcoming)

by Henri Nouwen

    Nathaniel was puzzled.  The note, centered on the otherwise blank right hand page of an open book, rested in the lap of a stranger who was writing intently on the opposite page.  Nathaniel assumed the hand-written words were intended for forthcoming publication in a book by Henri Nouwen titled Journey of Angels.  But this stranger did not look like Henri Nouwen.  Even with face obscured, the long slender bones, the smooth white skin, and the shoulder length straight black hair gave the impression of a woman of solemn, angelic beauty.  And that is when things started to happen fast.

    Moments after Nathaniel awoke from his dream, as he felt that overwhelming thrill of being caught up bodily in seeming defiance of gravity, he was "one with a heavenly angel" -- that is how he thought of it, and that is what he wrote in his journal the next morning.  When he tried to cry out to his wife, what he wanted to tell to her was, "I'm one of them," meaning, one of the angels.  He was recalling that title:  Journey of Angels.  In the inner book of Nathaniel's experience, the Journey of Angels had indeed been "forthcoming," immediately so. But any connection with Henri Nouwen remained obscure.

    Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Nathaniel, there actually was a documentary film forthcoming about Henri Nouwen's latest enthusiasm, the flying trapeze.  "[The trapeze act] catapulted me into a new consciousness," wrote Nouwen,  "There in the air I saw the artistic realization of my deepest yearnings."  The film had been shot just a couple of weeks before Nathaniel's dream during the Christmas holliday season, 1994, when the circus came to Toronto.  In the film Nouwen confesses to being a theologian who taught at Yale and Harvard, and yet he claims, "this one act, taught me more than in many books."  He says that the art of trapeze flying, is like concentrative meditaiton:  you have to be completely "present in the present."  And so we see him gazing, wide eyed, doing is meditation in the realm of the body. In the art of trapeze flying a parable about trust.  Without the catcher catching, the flyer falls.  The flyer must trust the catcher.  The was Rodleigh, the head of the troupe, who spoke to Nouwen in the film, and his wife Jennie, also a flyer, who without words did her dance in the air, her straight black shoulder length hair fanning out and falling back in place with each flight.   Everything Nouen said about flying trapeze was really about his vocation as a priest: "in theory at least," said Nouwen in his Dutch accent, becoming serious with a touch of tearfulness in his tone, "spiritually, I have always liked to be a flyer."  The title of the film:  "Angels Over the Net."

    Nine months later, Nouwen began a sabbatical from his work at L'Arche, (the Arc) a community centered around people with severe mental and physical handicaps.  And as soon as he was free to begin his year of prayer, and solitude and writing, he started a book project he had been planning for some time.  He already had a contract with a publisher, and he already had purchased blank notebooks to write in, each with picture on the cover of an angel in flight.

    "Do you have a thought for your Angel?"  Every day in the first month of his sabbatical, September, 1995, Henri Nouwen sat down at his desk and asked this question.  It was just a fun "little game" to help him write.  Before him, on the front of his hard-covered notebook, the angel descending from heaven to earth on bright outstretched wings of orange and red, evocative of fire.  Amidst the powerful rush, and flash of graceful motion in the air, the face of the angel was peaceful, head tilted to on side, eyes focused downward toward on earth.   Henri wrote:  "My little book, which I carried with me wherever I went, became like a companion with whom I had intimate conversations." 

   At the end of his sabbatical year, on September 21, 1996, Henri Nouwen died.  Nathaniel heard news of his death.  He also heard a passing comment that Nouwen enjoyed watching the trapeze in his last years.  But that is all.  Two years passed.  Then in the winter of '98-'99 the diary Nouwen wrote kept during his final year, Sabbatical Journey came out in bookstores.  Nathaniel was in his favorite East Lansing bookstore, coffee house, Shoeler Books brousing, when he stumbled across the title.  He picked it up with a secret expectation, and skimming through the pages he scanned for one key word:  "Angel." 

    And before long, he saw it: The angel book story.  He was amazed.  He looked to see if the daybook of readings had come out, and there it was:  Bread for the Journey.  He opened it and read a few of the entries, and it was just as he suspected.  The teachings were relevant.  He put both books back and walked away without buying them.  He was not ready yet to dig deeper yet.