Angels: They Are Scary

They are not fat little naked babies beaming beatifically along the ceilings of late-rococo French frescoes. They are not air-brushed, honor-code compliant BYU students bouncing on a trampoline in white skirts for some dude's Deseret-book approved photo project. They are not Photoshopped underwear models digitally tweaked for the Victoria Secret Christmas ad campaign. And they certainly are not Precious Moments (tm) caricatures of that photocopied (and copyrighted) blonde-and-exaggerated-puppy-blue-eyes head sitting atop stock-photo wings-robe-and-halo #147.

They are nothing so safe, contained, and commercial as that.

No, according to every scriptural record extant, when an angel appears, they are described as brighter than the noon-day sun, with a "countenance like lightning," and when they speak, the Earth shakes. The first words off their lips are always "Fear not," for even the righteous Prophets fall to their faces in utter terror at the awful and horrible sight of a full-fledged angel in glory. You do not squee "awwww," you don't ask its number, you don't take a picture--at best you are drained of all your strength and consider your own nothingness; at worst the first-born in all of Egypt is slain, and/or you lie in a coma for three days.

I merely bring this up because Christmas is upon us, and there will be lights, and tinsel, and Virgin Mary Maternity Cards, and Michael Buble gently crooning "Fall on your knees/hear the angel's voices..." and Michael McLean having lil' Handel running Celestial choir practice the night of the Nativity for "The Forgotten Carols."

No, no, when Luke 2 reports of the Shepherds, "And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men," that was absolutely terrifying. These were praise choruses of such overwhelming power and brilliance quite beyond our own comprehension, let alone those of Late-Classical semi-nomadic illiterates. I don't mean that as a knock on the Shepherds, I'm mostly sure an encounter with a single angel, let alone a multitude, would be enough to send me to my knees. And not because it was so peaceful that it lulled me to sleep. Quite the opposite.

I love Christmas, I really do, commercialism and cult-of-Mithra-origins and warts and all. But I just know, I can feel it in my bones, that we're about to suffer through yet another round of "War on Christmas" Culture-War op-eds in the papers and blogs (as part of the season now as carolers and Charlie Brown specials), and all I got to say is, if we're going to put the Christ back in Christmas, if we're going to call attention to the fact that this was once a religious holiday, then seriously, let's make this religious.

And I don't just mean sitting quietly in the chapel (though I fully concede that that can be a religious experience too)--no, I mean that sense of overwhelming awe that comes at realizing that there are a trillion trillion stars beyond our own meager night-sky, that there are forces quite above our meager comprehension, that overwhelming sense of the sublime that briefly shatters your mind and illuminates your soul. Joy to the World, not Silent Night, was always my favorite Christmas hymn--this is Mary in travail without anesthesia, screaming into the night, these were choruses of angels whose cries of Peace on Earth Good Will to men were all that kept the Shepherds from running and crying in holy terror.

I want a sense of awe back in the Christmas season, and an acknowledgment of the grandeur and awful glory of God. I want even atheists and agnostics to gaze into the cold sky of a Christmas Eve, peer through the fog of their own frigid breath and feel the awesome wonder of creation, of our own nothingness and exaltation, and feel that awe bring them closer together, not farther apart.

I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and mean it. I want angels to frighten you. And I want to feel a Peace that comes because of the Post-Sublime shattering, of that reconciliation with God and nature and the movements of the stars in the sky, and not merely because we're all exhausted from yet another ugly-sweater party.