Angel's Feet
Stories
Contents
“Angel’s Feet” by David O. Bales
“Subway Ride, January 2, 2019” by David O. Bales
Angel’s Feet
by David O. Bales
Psalm 8
Kate reluctantly came home for the summer—for her mother’s sake. She’d rather be back combing through Europe’s art galleries and inching a step closer to her master’s degree. Instead, she was back in Mill Town and these three weeks had nearly sent her packing: smelling the sawdust and steamed lumber from the kilns and hearing the constant siren of the saws along with the roaring fork lifts and chugging log trucks. Her mother recognized her desperation for intellectual stimulation and aimed her to the newspaper’s story about the walking pairs web site. Her mother explained that the web site was run by three elderly Unitarian ladies promoting world peace two walkers at a time.
Kate signed up for the classification of “younger adult,” which erased the majority of walkers. She realized after her first two tries that motivation for the “younger” group tended to be therapy. Her first partner was recovering from a leg broken after tripping on uneven carpet. The second was fighting boredom as her bandaged left arm healed from an exploding espresso machine.
Kate tried to study in the mornings. She made little progress, however, because the heat of the summer necessitated the windows being open at night and the sounds of the mill’s second shift invaded her sleeping. She signed up for the next late afternoon walk with the same spurt of energy with which she began preparing her escape from Mill Town two weeks later.
She waited on the court house steps at 4 p.m. for Lawrence, guaranteed to be a “younger” person. When a cleanly shaven young man stepped beyond a group of bearded fellows Kate flicked her long brown hair out of her right eye and over her ear. She flung her head to the side and said, “A young man. Not many on this circuit.” The group of bearded fellows he was speaking with laughed and left.
“I’m Lawrence” he said, holding out his right hand but not looking her in the eye. Those guys just got off first shift. Stopped to tell me what’s going on at the mill.”
“You don’t work there?”
“Not anymore.”
Lawrence pointed east and then west as a question. Kate chose west and they were off. They took a brisker pace than her previous walks. It was difficult for her to determine which of them was supposed to be leading. She said, “I’m home from college for the summer. You?”
“I quit four years ago after sophomore year. Quit. Didn’t flunk out,” he said as he walked looking straight ahead.
“What was your major?”
“General studies. Didn’t declare. Came home to decide if I wanted to manage the mill. If so, I’d be the fourth generation Harper to do so.” He let only a fraction of a second lapse before asking, “Your major?”
“I’m doing a masters in art history, kind of art history mixed with psychology and religion.” Lawrence continued to walk facing forward so Kate went on, “It includes dreams, the unconscious, art and religion. It’s how nature and our social contacts first penetrate our minds and then emanate from us reminted in dreams, art and religion.” She wanted to stop and face him as she explained her work, but he didn’t slow or look at her arm or hand gestures. Kate wondered if the conversation must now sink to naming favorite NFL teams.
Without a stutter step, or a look at her, Lawrence asked, “Who’s work is leading you in this direction?”
“Jung. You know about him?”
“A few paragraphs in psych 101.”
“He’s really the first source for how dreams can express the depths of human life into art and religion. So when I study religious art I spend as much time scrutinizing the artists as their work.”
“Like Fra Angelico?” he asked as he marched next to her, looking directly ahead.
“Yes,” she said, surprise in her voice. “You know the angelic brother?”
“A couple pages in the art appreciation textbook. So you study his faith too?”
“That’s as important to me as the art he produced.” After a few steps she asked, “You religious?”
“An inherited Episcopalian from my great great grandfather on down. All bosses at the mill instantly become Episcopalians: snooty, reserved, enjoying all the Catholic bells and smells but not the guilt.”
“You religious now?” Kate asked.
“Yes and no, on and off, right now off.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Yep,” he answered instantly and seriously. “Does it bother you—my being bothered?”
“No,” Kate said, “that’s fine with me.”
They walked another half block away from the noise of the mill and toward the silence of the open fields.
“What I’m studying is that nature and humanity contribute to dreams which help inform and create art and religion. Sometimes a dream or moment in nature seems to assault us, strike us as an event whose meaning is almost beyond words. You dream?”
“Yep. About the mill.”
“Yet you’re not working there.”
“But I carry it around with me.”
“You think someday you’ll take over the mill? Not everybody has such a thing handed to them.”
“I’m not sure. Some days yes, some days no.”
They were now west of the town on a graded gravel path next to the road. They stopped talking when log trucks swooshed past them like mobile earthquakes.
“When you get your degree, you going to teach?”
“Probably. I’ve also thought about being a priest, Episcopalian, Catholic lite, sophisticated and reserved.”
Lawrence laughed and turned to look at her for the first time since they began walking. They laughed for half a minute. When they’d finally stopped and started walking again they giggled in fits for another couple minutes.
When Kate could finally speak without chuckling or hiccupping, she said, “I’m drawn to the Episcopal church because of a tradition that’s open to God around us in nature and within us in the Spirit. Along with the biblical data they turn the messages from around us and within us into all kinds of art, including the liturgy and snooty music.”
Lawrence had returned to his forward only stance but Kate could tell he was listening intently. “When I’m worshipping in an Episcopal church it’s like my favorite painting in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. It’s Tintorello’s Christ Carried to the Tomb. Early reproductions of the work had an arched top with an angel over head. But somebody cut off the top and now there’s just two small angel feet above the subject. It’s like God’s just hanging over us all the time, ready to break in.”
It was nearly dark and with a common gesture between them they decided to turn around. They stopped abruptly. The moon, now fully and gloriously risen, hung directly over the mill. They stood stunned, startled to silence. After a moment Lawrence asked slowly, “Angel’s feet?”
Kate shot open her arms, “Yes!” she proclaimed. “Angel’s feet!”
Preaching Point: God’s natural world above us can strike the deepest within us.
* * *
Subway Ride, January 2, 2019
by David O. Bales
Ecclesiastes 3:1-13
It was Nan’s idea and Agatha couldn’t figure out why it bothered her so much. Simple thing: New Year’s resolution. It seemed to Agatha that the office staff instantly agreed with Nan that if everyone didn’t make a resolution they should. Nan organized everything from the office pools of the NCAA basketball finals to the pool for the city’s annual roach races. For now everyone—Nan decreed—had to come up with a new year’s resolution. On the first work day in January they’d be shared and evaluated: Most worthwhile; funniest; most likely to be broken soonest; most beneficial to humanity; most likely to be copied by others—which Agatha labeled “one size fits all.”
January second arrived and Agatha stood grasping the subway car’s jerking strap, hardly aware of her surroundings. She didn’t scorn activities such as resolution-making. It’s just that she used words in order to live in a separate parallel world, a slightly different plane of consciousness. She referred to it as an obsolete model of a mental hyper existence. She viewed herself as a partial clone of those mythical Asian holy people who could exist upon thinking alone. Because of her life with words, the stating of a new year’s resolution had become an urgent life project. If she were to latch onto a statement to aim for, she was at it for real.
She was old enough—43—that she should be past fiddling with trivial definitions and arrangements of words. Fact was, she’d occupied herself with individual words or statements for all of her life. Beth was her cubicle partner whom Agatha dubbed “the tire on the car with the most tread.” Beth was used to Agatha’s mumbling phrases and occasionally spurting out a single word like “triskaidekaphobia” or “phantasmagoric.” Yet now Agatha had smashed against this realization that her attraction to sweet sounding words, a fascination that must surely have begun when she was in the her bassinette—when her father called the fabric a “blanket” and her mother named it eternally a “blankie”—was not serving her. She hadn’t been able to arrive at a new year’s resolution.
She’d always swirled words in her mind. She splattered her environment with her own definitions, naming the cold exam room at her doctor’s clinic as “The Crisper,” and the office building’s swift but bumpy elevator, “The Chute.” The phrase “listen fluently” kept her mind busy for a month. She also was occupied with “let your mirror become a window.” Such sayings didn’t have to be eternally or even approximately true, just something that would snare the ears of her brain, which was a word picture she’d pondered quite a while. She could roll a phrase over in her mind during most of her waking hours and then delete it as if it were a book she’d read without profit and returned to the library. Its only qualification was if it would trip unbroken off the tongue or ring well on the ear. Could be a lofty phrase or an advertising jingle. Poems especially caught her, “Loveliest of tree, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bough.” If she didn’t have some words circling in her grey matter she was disquieted.
Now she found herself dissatisfied with all she’d embraced from the world of words. They seemed fabricated, almost plastic; because, words were failing her. Having considered her affair with words, all before seemed to land too safely within life’s less dangerous fringes. She held up a few of her favorites for inspection: “If you don’t know where you plan to go, you’ll end up somewhere else.” That was adequate. Helped her a little, didn’t hurt anything. One entire summer she repeated, “I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.” Catchy, but something to build your life upon? Better was a quote from Augustine of Hippo, “Time takes no holidays.” Makes you think, that one. She loved to hear her mind recite: “My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night.” The suggestion that she allow her life to become a poem was not near enough to the marrow. Sounded too much like a tourist attraction for the mind.
This resolution venture struck her as more than mental busy-work; thus she was in a stew, a royal conundrum she called it, bothered by a self-challenge. She seemed to be asking herself if she was confronting life’s job or life’s joke. So intense a task made her feel, in the lurching subway car, that she was standing on the edge of a precipice.
A resolution means what one intends to do. That’s what riled her. This wasn’t to be a motto she could plaster on her refrigerator or tuck on the corner of her bathroom mirror. It should come crashing into her brain like a rhinoceros through the brush. She wanted to assign herself the resolution of something high and wide, specific and general, something that could subsume gene rearrangement, peacemaking, ship building, and weather forecasting.
It must congeal around life’s base metals, touch life’s center with nerves reaching to the fingertips. It must extend the frontier of her life to the sharpest edge of living. A reason, she said to herself, something that will incite me, impel me. No ruffles or ribbons, but motivating and guiding. What high spiritual tide can wash clean the shore of my consciousness and leave a resolution worth living?
The subway car’s speaker rang her stop and she, without consciously hearing it, exited with the rest of the folk she crowded with everyday. Everyday, she thought, as she clipped up the steps to the street. One more block to face a dozen others who bring their resolutions. Agatha plunged forward to her destiny with no solution to her lack of resolution, a rhyme she quickly jettisoned.
At the 10 a.m. break Nan shooed the staff around the corner to the watercooler. The moment of judgment, Agatha thought. The resolutions began, serious and funny. Agatha edged to the end of the reporting order. She stood next to Beth who announced: “I couldn’t exactly come up with a resolution, but yesterday I heard what I feel gives a reason for a resolution.” She held up a piece of paper and read from verses one through eight of Ecclesiastes chapter three. This was different from the other resolutions, not even a resolution. The group was mostly respectful of this insertion of religion, only one person smirked.
Agatha was next. Everyone turned to her, knowing she always had some sly or bombastic statement to make. Today she didn’t bring anything to say, and now she had a second reason for having nothing to say. She tipped her head sideways in thought. Her mind registered how Ecclesiastes’ words tucked around life: social and private, high and low, wide and narrow. This rhythmic rumbling folded together comprehensive pairs of opposites… or if not opposites, complements… or if not complements….
She held her head sideways for a number of seconds. She became aware that everyone was waiting for her. She cleared her throat and spoke in an unaccented, almost placid voice, as though she were rattling off the answer to a simple mathematical problem: “I vote Beth’s resolution for us all.”
Preaching point: Ecclesiastes chapter three surrounds life.
*****************************************
StoryShare, January 1, 2019 issue.
Copyright 2018 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“Angel’s Feet” by David O. Bales
“Subway Ride, January 2, 2019” by David O. Bales
Angel’s Feet
by David O. Bales
Psalm 8
Kate reluctantly came home for the summer—for her mother’s sake. She’d rather be back combing through Europe’s art galleries and inching a step closer to her master’s degree. Instead, she was back in Mill Town and these three weeks had nearly sent her packing: smelling the sawdust and steamed lumber from the kilns and hearing the constant siren of the saws along with the roaring fork lifts and chugging log trucks. Her mother recognized her desperation for intellectual stimulation and aimed her to the newspaper’s story about the walking pairs web site. Her mother explained that the web site was run by three elderly Unitarian ladies promoting world peace two walkers at a time.
Kate signed up for the classification of “younger adult,” which erased the majority of walkers. She realized after her first two tries that motivation for the “younger” group tended to be therapy. Her first partner was recovering from a leg broken after tripping on uneven carpet. The second was fighting boredom as her bandaged left arm healed from an exploding espresso machine.
Kate tried to study in the mornings. She made little progress, however, because the heat of the summer necessitated the windows being open at night and the sounds of the mill’s second shift invaded her sleeping. She signed up for the next late afternoon walk with the same spurt of energy with which she began preparing her escape from Mill Town two weeks later.
She waited on the court house steps at 4 p.m. for Lawrence, guaranteed to be a “younger” person. When a cleanly shaven young man stepped beyond a group of bearded fellows Kate flicked her long brown hair out of her right eye and over her ear. She flung her head to the side and said, “A young man. Not many on this circuit.” The group of bearded fellows he was speaking with laughed and left.
“I’m Lawrence” he said, holding out his right hand but not looking her in the eye. Those guys just got off first shift. Stopped to tell me what’s going on at the mill.”
“You don’t work there?”
“Not anymore.”
Lawrence pointed east and then west as a question. Kate chose west and they were off. They took a brisker pace than her previous walks. It was difficult for her to determine which of them was supposed to be leading. She said, “I’m home from college for the summer. You?”
“I quit four years ago after sophomore year. Quit. Didn’t flunk out,” he said as he walked looking straight ahead.
“What was your major?”
“General studies. Didn’t declare. Came home to decide if I wanted to manage the mill. If so, I’d be the fourth generation Harper to do so.” He let only a fraction of a second lapse before asking, “Your major?”
“I’m doing a masters in art history, kind of art history mixed with psychology and religion.” Lawrence continued to walk facing forward so Kate went on, “It includes dreams, the unconscious, art and religion. It’s how nature and our social contacts first penetrate our minds and then emanate from us reminted in dreams, art and religion.” She wanted to stop and face him as she explained her work, but he didn’t slow or look at her arm or hand gestures. Kate wondered if the conversation must now sink to naming favorite NFL teams.
Without a stutter step, or a look at her, Lawrence asked, “Who’s work is leading you in this direction?”
“Jung. You know about him?”
“A few paragraphs in psych 101.”
“He’s really the first source for how dreams can express the depths of human life into art and religion. So when I study religious art I spend as much time scrutinizing the artists as their work.”
“Like Fra Angelico?” he asked as he marched next to her, looking directly ahead.
“Yes,” she said, surprise in her voice. “You know the angelic brother?”
“A couple pages in the art appreciation textbook. So you study his faith too?”
“That’s as important to me as the art he produced.” After a few steps she asked, “You religious?”
“An inherited Episcopalian from my great great grandfather on down. All bosses at the mill instantly become Episcopalians: snooty, reserved, enjoying all the Catholic bells and smells but not the guilt.”
“You religious now?” Kate asked.
“Yes and no, on and off, right now off.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Yep,” he answered instantly and seriously. “Does it bother you—my being bothered?”
“No,” Kate said, “that’s fine with me.”
They walked another half block away from the noise of the mill and toward the silence of the open fields.
“What I’m studying is that nature and humanity contribute to dreams which help inform and create art and religion. Sometimes a dream or moment in nature seems to assault us, strike us as an event whose meaning is almost beyond words. You dream?”
“Yep. About the mill.”
“Yet you’re not working there.”
“But I carry it around with me.”
“You think someday you’ll take over the mill? Not everybody has such a thing handed to them.”
“I’m not sure. Some days yes, some days no.”
They were now west of the town on a graded gravel path next to the road. They stopped talking when log trucks swooshed past them like mobile earthquakes.
“When you get your degree, you going to teach?”
“Probably. I’ve also thought about being a priest, Episcopalian, Catholic lite, sophisticated and reserved.”
Lawrence laughed and turned to look at her for the first time since they began walking. They laughed for half a minute. When they’d finally stopped and started walking again they giggled in fits for another couple minutes.
When Kate could finally speak without chuckling or hiccupping, she said, “I’m drawn to the Episcopal church because of a tradition that’s open to God around us in nature and within us in the Spirit. Along with the biblical data they turn the messages from around us and within us into all kinds of art, including the liturgy and snooty music.”
Lawrence had returned to his forward only stance but Kate could tell he was listening intently. “When I’m worshipping in an Episcopal church it’s like my favorite painting in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. It’s Tintorello’s Christ Carried to the Tomb. Early reproductions of the work had an arched top with an angel over head. But somebody cut off the top and now there’s just two small angel feet above the subject. It’s like God’s just hanging over us all the time, ready to break in.”
It was nearly dark and with a common gesture between them they decided to turn around. They stopped abruptly. The moon, now fully and gloriously risen, hung directly over the mill. They stood stunned, startled to silence. After a moment Lawrence asked slowly, “Angel’s feet?”
Kate shot open her arms, “Yes!” she proclaimed. “Angel’s feet!”
Preaching Point: God’s natural world above us can strike the deepest within us.
* * *
Subway Ride, January 2, 2019
by David O. Bales
Ecclesiastes 3:1-13
It was Nan’s idea and Agatha couldn’t figure out why it bothered her so much. Simple thing: New Year’s resolution. It seemed to Agatha that the office staff instantly agreed with Nan that if everyone didn’t make a resolution they should. Nan organized everything from the office pools of the NCAA basketball finals to the pool for the city’s annual roach races. For now everyone—Nan decreed—had to come up with a new year’s resolution. On the first work day in January they’d be shared and evaluated: Most worthwhile; funniest; most likely to be broken soonest; most beneficial to humanity; most likely to be copied by others—which Agatha labeled “one size fits all.”
January second arrived and Agatha stood grasping the subway car’s jerking strap, hardly aware of her surroundings. She didn’t scorn activities such as resolution-making. It’s just that she used words in order to live in a separate parallel world, a slightly different plane of consciousness. She referred to it as an obsolete model of a mental hyper existence. She viewed herself as a partial clone of those mythical Asian holy people who could exist upon thinking alone. Because of her life with words, the stating of a new year’s resolution had become an urgent life project. If she were to latch onto a statement to aim for, she was at it for real.
She was old enough—43—that she should be past fiddling with trivial definitions and arrangements of words. Fact was, she’d occupied herself with individual words or statements for all of her life. Beth was her cubicle partner whom Agatha dubbed “the tire on the car with the most tread.” Beth was used to Agatha’s mumbling phrases and occasionally spurting out a single word like “triskaidekaphobia” or “phantasmagoric.” Yet now Agatha had smashed against this realization that her attraction to sweet sounding words, a fascination that must surely have begun when she was in the her bassinette—when her father called the fabric a “blanket” and her mother named it eternally a “blankie”—was not serving her. She hadn’t been able to arrive at a new year’s resolution.
She’d always swirled words in her mind. She splattered her environment with her own definitions, naming the cold exam room at her doctor’s clinic as “The Crisper,” and the office building’s swift but bumpy elevator, “The Chute.” The phrase “listen fluently” kept her mind busy for a month. She also was occupied with “let your mirror become a window.” Such sayings didn’t have to be eternally or even approximately true, just something that would snare the ears of her brain, which was a word picture she’d pondered quite a while. She could roll a phrase over in her mind during most of her waking hours and then delete it as if it were a book she’d read without profit and returned to the library. Its only qualification was if it would trip unbroken off the tongue or ring well on the ear. Could be a lofty phrase or an advertising jingle. Poems especially caught her, “Loveliest of tree, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bough.” If she didn’t have some words circling in her grey matter she was disquieted.
Now she found herself dissatisfied with all she’d embraced from the world of words. They seemed fabricated, almost plastic; because, words were failing her. Having considered her affair with words, all before seemed to land too safely within life’s less dangerous fringes. She held up a few of her favorites for inspection: “If you don’t know where you plan to go, you’ll end up somewhere else.” That was adequate. Helped her a little, didn’t hurt anything. One entire summer she repeated, “I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.” Catchy, but something to build your life upon? Better was a quote from Augustine of Hippo, “Time takes no holidays.” Makes you think, that one. She loved to hear her mind recite: “My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night.” The suggestion that she allow her life to become a poem was not near enough to the marrow. Sounded too much like a tourist attraction for the mind.
This resolution venture struck her as more than mental busy-work; thus she was in a stew, a royal conundrum she called it, bothered by a self-challenge. She seemed to be asking herself if she was confronting life’s job or life’s joke. So intense a task made her feel, in the lurching subway car, that she was standing on the edge of a precipice.
A resolution means what one intends to do. That’s what riled her. This wasn’t to be a motto she could plaster on her refrigerator or tuck on the corner of her bathroom mirror. It should come crashing into her brain like a rhinoceros through the brush. She wanted to assign herself the resolution of something high and wide, specific and general, something that could subsume gene rearrangement, peacemaking, ship building, and weather forecasting.
It must congeal around life’s base metals, touch life’s center with nerves reaching to the fingertips. It must extend the frontier of her life to the sharpest edge of living. A reason, she said to herself, something that will incite me, impel me. No ruffles or ribbons, but motivating and guiding. What high spiritual tide can wash clean the shore of my consciousness and leave a resolution worth living?
The subway car’s speaker rang her stop and she, without consciously hearing it, exited with the rest of the folk she crowded with everyday. Everyday, she thought, as she clipped up the steps to the street. One more block to face a dozen others who bring their resolutions. Agatha plunged forward to her destiny with no solution to her lack of resolution, a rhyme she quickly jettisoned.
At the 10 a.m. break Nan shooed the staff around the corner to the watercooler. The moment of judgment, Agatha thought. The resolutions began, serious and funny. Agatha edged to the end of the reporting order. She stood next to Beth who announced: “I couldn’t exactly come up with a resolution, but yesterday I heard what I feel gives a reason for a resolution.” She held up a piece of paper and read from verses one through eight of Ecclesiastes chapter three. This was different from the other resolutions, not even a resolution. The group was mostly respectful of this insertion of religion, only one person smirked.
Agatha was next. Everyone turned to her, knowing she always had some sly or bombastic statement to make. Today she didn’t bring anything to say, and now she had a second reason for having nothing to say. She tipped her head sideways in thought. Her mind registered how Ecclesiastes’ words tucked around life: social and private, high and low, wide and narrow. This rhythmic rumbling folded together comprehensive pairs of opposites… or if not opposites, complements… or if not complements….
She held her head sideways for a number of seconds. She became aware that everyone was waiting for her. She cleared her throat and spoke in an unaccented, almost placid voice, as though she were rattling off the answer to a simple mathematical problem: “I vote Beth’s resolution for us all.”
Preaching point: Ecclesiastes chapter three surrounds life.
*****************************************
StoryShare, January 1, 2019 issue.
Copyright 2018 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
