Chapter FIVE
Songs of the Seraphim
IF EVER I’D BEEN STUNNED IN MY LIFE, IT WAS NOTHING compared to what I felt now. Only gradually did the shapes and colors of my living room emerge from the haze in which I’d plummeted as soon as Malchiah had stopped.
I came to myself, seated on the couch and staring forward. And I saw him, with utter clarity, as he stood against the wall of books.
I was shattered, broken, unable to speak.
All he’d shown me had been so vivid, so immediate, that I was still reeling to find myself in the present moment, or anchored securely in any moment at all.
My sense of sorrow, of deep and terrible remorse, was such that I looked away from him, and slowly dropped my face in my hands.
The thinnest hope of salvation sustained me. In my heart of hearts I whispered, “Lord, forgive me that I ever separated myself from you.” Yet I felt at the same moment that I formed these words, You don’t believe it. You don’t believe it, even though he’s revealed you more intimately than you could ever have revealed yourself. You don’t believe. You’re afraid to believe.
I heard him move towards me and then I came to myself again with him beside me.
“Pray for faith,” he whispered in my ear.
And I did.
An old ritual came back to me.
On bitter winter afternoons, when I’d dreaded going home from school, I’d shepherded Emily and Jacob into Holy Name of Jesus Church, and there I’d prayed: Lord, set my heart afire with faith, because I am losing faith. Lord, touch my heart, and set it afire.
The old images I’d used returned to me, as fresh as if it were yesterday. I saw the faint design of my heart and the bursting yellow flame. My memory lacked the vibrant inescapable color and motion of all Malchiah had shown to me. But this I prayed with all my being. The old pictures faded suddenly, and I was left with the words of the prayer alone.
It was no ordinary “being alone.” I stood before God without moving. I had some instantaneous flash of walking up a hillside on soft grass, and seeing ahead of me a robed figure, and the old ruminations came to me: That’s the glory of it; thousands of years have passed, and yet you can follow Him so close!
“Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry,” I whispered. For all my sins because of the fear of Hell, but most of all, most of all, most of all, because I have separated myself from You.
I sat back on the couch, and I felt myself drifting, dangerously close to losing consciousness, as if I’d been beaten by all I’d seen, deservedly so, but my body couldn’t sustain the blows. How could I love God so much, and be so utterly sorry for what I had become, and yet not have faith?
I closed my eyes.
“My Toby,” Malchiah whispered. “You know the extent of what you’ve done, but you can’t comprehend the extent of what He knows.”
I felt Malchiah’s arm around my shoulder. I felt the tightness of his fingers. And then I was aware that he’d risen, and softly I heard his footfall as he moved across the room.
I looked up to see him standing opposite me, and once again there was that sense of his vivid coloring, his distinct and beguiling shape. A subtle but certain light emanated from him. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I’d seen this incandescent light when he first appeared to me at the Mission Inn. I hadn’t had an explanation for it and so rejected it as fancy, out of hand.
Now I didn’t reject it. I marveled. His face was stricken. He was happy. He seemed almost joyful. And something came back to me from the gospels, about the joy in Heaven when one penitent soul returns.
“Let’s make swift work of it,” he said eagerly. And this time no jarring images accompanied his softly spoken words.
“You know well enough how things went afterwards,” he said. “You never told The Right Man your real name, no matter how he insisted, and in time, when the agencies named you Lucky, it became The Right Man’s name for you as well. You took it to yourself with bitter irony, accomplishing one mission after another, and begging not to be idle when you knew what those words meant.”
I said nothing. I realized I was looking at him through a thin veil of tears. How I had gloried in my despair. I had been a young man drowning, and fighting a sea beast as if it mattered, as the waves closed overhead.
“In those first years, you worked in Europe often. No matter what the disguise, your height and your high blond coloring served you well. You penetrated banks and fine restaurants, hospitals and fine hotels. You never used a gun again, because you didn’t have to. ‘The Needle Sniper,’ said the reports that detailed your obvious triumphs, and always well after the fact. They shuffled the dim conflicting video images of you in vain.
“Alone, you went to Rome and wandered St. Peter’s Basilica. You traveled north through Assisi and Siena and Perugia, and on to Milan and Prague and Vienna. Once you went to England just to visit the barren landscape where the Bront? sisters had lived and written their great books; alone you watched performances of Shakespeare’s plays. You roamed the Tower of London, colorless and lost among the other tourists. You lived a life devoid of witnesses. You lived a life more perfectly alone than anyone could imagine, except perhaps for The Right Man.
“But soon enough you stopped your visits with him. You didn’t care for his easy laughter or agreeable observations, or the casual way in which he discussed the things he wanted you to do. Over a phone you could tolerate it; at a dinner table you found it unbearable. The food was tasteless and dry in your mouth.
“And so you drifted far from that last witness who became instead a phantom at the end of a lifeline, and no longer a pretended friend.”
He stopped. He turned and ran his fingers over the books on the shelves before him. He looked so solid, so perfect, so unimagined.
I think I heard myself gasp, or perhaps it was a dull choking sound that might have meant tears.
“This became your life,” he said in the same muted, unhurried voice, “these books of yours and safe trips within this country because it had become too dangerous for you to risk the borders, and you settled here, not nine months ago, drinking in the southern California light as if you’d lived your earlier days in a darkened room.”
He turned around.
“I want you now,” he said. “But your redemption lies with The Maker, with your faith in Him. The faith is stirring in you. You know that, don’t you? You’ve already asked for forgiveness. You’ve already admitted the truth of all I revealed to you, and seventy times more. Do you know that God has forgiven you?”
I couldn’t answer. How could anyone forgive the things I’d done?
“We’re speaking here,” he whispered, “of Almighty God.”
“I want it,” I whispered. “What can I do?” I asked. “What is it that you want of me that might make up for the smallest part of it?”
“Become my helper,” he said. “Become my human instrument to help me do what I must do on Earth.” He leaned against the book-lined wall, and brought his hands together, as any man might, to make a steeple of his fingers, just below his lips.
“Leave this empty life you’ve fashioned for yourself,” he said, “and pledge to me your wits, your courage, your cunning, and your uncommon physical grace. You’re remarkably brave where others might be timid. You’re clever where others might be dull. All that you are, I can use.”
I smiled at that. Because I knew what he meant. Actually I understood everything he was saying.
“You hear the speech of other humans with the ears of a musician,” he continued. “And you love what is harmonious and what is beautiful. For all your sins, yours is an educated heart. All this I can put to work to answer the prayers that The Maker has told me to answer. I’ve asked for a human instrument to do His bidding. You are that instrument. Entrust yourself to Him and to me.”
I felt the first inkling of true happiness I’d known in years. “I want to believe you,” I whispered. “I want to be this instrument, but I think, for the first time in my life perhaps, I am genuinely afraid.”
“No, you’re not. You haven’t accepted His forgiveness. You must trust that He can forgive a man like you. And He has.”
He didn’t wait for me to respond.
“You cannot imagine the universe that surrounds you. You cannot see it as we see it from Heaven. You cannot hear the prayers rising everywhere, in every century, from every continent, from heart after heart.
“We’re needed, you and I, in what for you will be a former era, but not for me, who can see those years as clearly as I see this moment now. From Natural Time to Natural Time you’ll go. But I exist in Angel Time, and you’ll travel with me through that as well.”
“Angel Time,” I whispered. What did I envision?
He spoke again. “The glance of The Maker encompasses all time. He knows all that is, was, or will be. He knows all that could be. And He is the Teacher of all the rest of us, insofar as we can comprehend.”
Something was changing in me, completely. My mind sought to grasp the sum total of all he’d revealed to me, and as much as I knew of theology and philosophy, I could only do this without words.
There came back to me some phrases of Augustine, quoted by Aquinas, and I murmured them softly under my breath:
“Although we cannot number the infinite, nevertheless it can be comprehended by Him whose knowledge has no bounds. ”
He was smiling. He was musing.
A great shift in me had now taken place.
I remained quiet.
He went on.
“I can’t rock the sensibilities of those who need me as I’ve rocked yours. I need you to enter their solid world at my guidance, a human being as they are human, a man as some of them are men. I need you to intervene not to bring death, but on the side of life. Say that you’re willing, and your life is turned from evil, you confirm it, and you’re at once plunged into the danger and heartache of trying to do what is unquestionably good.”
Danger and heartache.
“I’ll do it,” I said. I wanted to repeat the words, but they seemed to linger in the air before us. “Wherever—only show me what you want from me, show me how to do your bidding. Show me! I don’t care about danger. I don’t care about heartache. You tell me that it’s good, and I’ll do it. Dear God, I believe You have forgiven me! And give me this chance! I’m Yours.”
I felt an immediate and unexpected happiness, a lightness, and then joy.
At once the air around me changed.
The colors of the room blurred and brightened. It seemed I was being lifted out of the frame of a picture, and the picture itself grew larger and fainter, and then dissolved around me in a thin and weightless and shimmering mist.
“Malchiah!” I cried out.
“I’m beside you,” came his voice.
We were traveling upwards. The day had melted into a fine purple darkness but the darkness was filled with a soft caressing light. Then it shattered into a billion pinpoints of fire.
An inexpressibly beautiful sound caught me. It seemed to hold me as surely as the currents of air were supporting me, as surely as Malchiah’s warm presence guided me, though I could see nothing now but the starry heavens, and the sound became a great deep beautiful note, like the after echo of a great bronze gong.
A sharp wind had risen, but the echoing tone rose over it, and there came other notes, melting, vibrant, as if from the throats of so many pure and weightless bells. Slowly, the music dissolved the sound of the wind into itself entirely, as it swelled and quickened, and I felt I was hearing a singing more fluid and rich than anything I had ever heard. It transcended the anthems of the earth so obviously and indescribably that all sense of time left me. I could only imagine listening to these songs forever and I felt no sense of myself at all.
Dear God, that I ever abandoned You, turned my back on You … I am Yours.
The stars had so multiplied in number as to seem the sands of the sea. In fact, there was no darkness apart from brilliance, yet each star pulsed with a perfect iridescent light. And all around me, above, below, beside, I saw what seemed like shooting stars, whipping past me without a sound.
I felt bodiless, in the very midst of this, and never wanting to leave this again. Suddenly, as if it had been told to me, I realized these shooting stars were angels. I simply knew it. I knew they were angels traveling up and down and across and diagonally, their swift and inevitable journeys part of the warp and woof of this great universal realm.
As for me, I wasn’t traveling with this speed. I was drifting. And yet even that word carries too much the weight of gravity for the state in which I found myself completely at ease.
Very slowly the swelling music yielded to another sound. It came hushed and then ever more urgent, a chorus of whispers rising from below. So many soft and secretive voices joined in this whispering as it blended itself with the music that it seemed all the world beneath us, or around us, was filled with this whispering, and I heard a multitude of syllables, yet all seemed to be sending up one simple plea.
I looked down, amazed that I had any sense of direction. The music continued to fade as the sight of a great solid planet came into view. I ached for the music. I felt I couldn’t bear losing it. But we were plunging down towards the planet, and I knew this was just and right, and I didn’t resist it in any way.
Everywhere the moving stars still darted to and fro, and there was no doubt in my mind at all now that these were angels answering prayers. These were the active messengers of God, and I felt utterly privileged to be seeing this, even though the most ethereal music I’d ever heard was now almost gone.
The chorus of whispers was vast and in its own way a perfect yet darker sound. These are the songs of earth, I thought, quite consciously, and they are filled with sadness and need and worship and reverence and awe.
I saw the dark masses of land appear, spectacled with myriad lights, and the great satin gleam of the seas. Cities were visible to me as great webs of illumination appearing and disappearing beneath the layer upon layer of dim cloud. Then I made out smaller configurations as we moved down.
The music was altogether gone now, and the chorus of prayers was the melody that filled my ears.
For a split second, a multitude of questions came to me, but at once they were answered. We were approaching Earth but in a different time.
“Remember,” Malchiah said softly against my ear, “that The Maker knows all things, all that is past and present, all that has happened and will happen, and what might happen as well. Remember there is no past or future where The Maker is but only the vast present of all things living.”
I was utterly convinced of the truth of this, and absorbed in it, and again an immense gratitude filled me, a gratitude so overwhelming that it dwarfed any emotion I’d ever consciously known. I was traveling with Malchiah through Angel Time and back into Natural Time, and I was safe in his purpose because that was his grasp.
The myriad pinpoints of light, those moving at great speed, were now thinning, or deliberately fading from my view. Just below us, in a well of whispering and frantic praying, I saw a great group of snow-covered rooftops, and chimneys giving to the night air their reddened smoke.
The delicious smell of burning fires rose to my nostrils. The prayers had words and varying intensity, but I couldn’t make out what they said.
I felt my entire body take form again, even as the whispering enveloped me, and I became aware too that my old garments were gone. I wore something that felt like heavy wool.
But I didn’t care about myself or how I was clothed. I was too entranced by the sight below.
I thought I saw a river moving through the houses, a ribbon of silver in the darkness, and the vague shape of what must have been a very large cathedral with its inevitable cruciform shape. On a great rise, there stood what had to be a castle. And all the rest was the rooftops crowded together, some utterly blanketed in white and others so steep that the snow had somewhat fallen away.
Indeed the snow was falling with a delicious softness that I could hear.
Louder and louder came the great chorus of overlapping whispers.
“They’re praying, and they’re frightened,” I said aloud, and heard my voice very immediate and close to myself, as though I weren’t in this vast expanse of sky. A chill came over me. The air enveloped me. I felt the snow on my face and hands. I wanted desperately to hear the lost music one last time, and to my astonishment I did hear it in a great swelling echo, and then it was gone.
I wanted to weep in gratitude just for that, but I had to find out what I was meant to do. I didn’t deserve to hear the music. And the idea that I could do something good in this world gripped me as I fought back tears.
“They’re praying for Meir and for Fluria,” said Malchiah. “They are praying for all the Jewry of the town. You must be the answer to their prayers.”
“But how, what will I do?” I struggled to form the words, but we were very close to the rooftops now, and I could make out the lanes and streets of the place, and the snow covered the towers of the castle, and the roof of the cathedral that gleamed as if the starlight could shine through the drifting downfall, making all of the little town very plain.
“It’s early evening in the town of Norwich,” said Malchiah, his voice intimate and perfect, and undisturbed by our descent or the prayers rising in my ears. “The Christmas pageants have only just ended and a time of troubles for the Jewry has begun.”
I didn’t have to ask him to go on. I knew the word, “Jewry,” referred to the Jewish population in Norwich and to the small area where most of them lived.
Our descent had become more rapid. Indeed I did see a river, and for a moment, I felt I saw the prayers themselves rising, but the sky was thickening, the roofs were like ghosts beneath me, and I felt again the wet brush of falling snow.
We found ourselves now passing into the town itself, and slowly I found myself standing firmly on the ground. We were surrounded by close half-timbered houses that seemed to slant inward dangerously, as if they’d tumble down on us in an instant. There were dim lights in tiny thick windows.
Only small snowflakes were swirling in the cold air.
I looked down in the dim light and saw that I was dressed as a monk, and I recognized the habit immediately. I wore the white tunic and long white scapular, and the black hooded mantle, of a Dominican. There was the familiar knotted cord of a girdle around my waist but the long scapular covered it. Over my left shoulder was a leather book bag. I was stunned.
I put up my hands anxiously and discovered that I’d been tonsured, and that I had the simple bald pate and ring of trimmed hair that monks of those times wore.
“You’ve made me what I always wanted to be,” I said. “A Dominican friar.” I felt such excitement that I couldn’t contain it. I wanted to know what I carried in the leather book bag.
“Now listen,” he said, and though I couldn’t see him, his voice echoed off the walls. We seemed lost in the shadows. In fact, he was not visible at all. I was alone here.
I could hear angry voices in the night, not very far away. And the chorus of prayers had died away.
“I’m right beside you,” he said.
For a minute I felt panic, but then I felt the press of his hand on mine.
“Listen to me,” he said. “It’s a mob you hear in the next street, and time is short. King Henry of Winchester sits on the English throne,” he explained. “And you may reckon this to be the year 1257, but neither of these bits of information will be of interest to you here. You know the time as well perhaps as any human of your own century, and you know it as it cannot know itself. Meir and Fluria are your charges, and all the Jewry are praying because Meir and Fluria are in danger, and as you well understand, that danger may extend to the entire little Jewish population of this town. That danger could reach as far as London.”
I was utterly fascinated, and wildly excited, more so than I’d ever been in my natural life. And I did know these times and the peril that had surrounded the Jews of England everywhere.
I was also getting very cold.
I looked down and saw that I wore buckled shoes. I felt woolen stockings on my legs. Thank Heaven, I wasn’t a Franciscan and consigned to sandals or bare feet, I thought, and then a giddy sensation gripped me. I had to stop this nonsense and think of what I was meant to do.
“Precisely,” came Malchiah’s intimate voice. “But will you take pleasure in what you mean to do here? Yes, you will. There is no angel of God who does not take joy in helping humans. And you are working with us now. You are our child.”
“Can these people see me?”
“Most definitely. They’ll see and hear you, and you will understand them and they will understand you. You will know when you are speaking French or English or Hebrew, and when they are speaking those tongues. Such things are easy enough for us to do.”
“But what about you?”
“I’ll be with you always, as I told you,” he said. “But only you will see and hear me. Don’t try to speak to me with your lips. And don’t call for me unless you have to do it.
“Now go to the mob and get into the very thick of it, because it’s turning in a way that it should not. You are a traveling scholar, you’ve come from Italy, through France, to England, and your name is Br. Toby, which is simple enough.”
I was more eager to do this than I could express.
“But what more do I need to know?”
“Trust your gifts,” he said. “The gifts for which I chose you. You’re well-spoken, even eloquent, and you have great confidence in playing a role for a certain purpose. Trust in The Maker and trust in me.”
I could hear the voices in the nearby street growing louder. A bell was tolling.
“That must be the curfew,” I said quickly. My mind was racing. What I knew of this century seemed scant suddenly and again I felt apprehension, almost fear.
“It is the curfew,” said Malchiah. “And it will inflame those who are making the trouble, because they’re eager for a resolution. Now go.”