Join the club, he thought.
He wrote: “I’m sorry things are so difficult for you now. I have time on Friday at 2:30 if you are free.”
It’s easy to say the right thing to people most of the time, because they have such ordinary problems. They feel unique to the person experiencing them, but if they were in the position to hear everyone else’s innermost fears, they’d see it was all very commonplace.
But there are those brief, transcendent moments where everything seems to stop, all of the energy of the world seems to be in harmony, and we’re transported outside of normal experience and feel the presence of God. You go through the rest of your life powered by those tiny glimpses of the divine.
His mind was invaded once again by the thought of his angel. It came back as a series of images. The way his hair fell onto his face. The way he moved when he walked, his head high, leading with his hips. The absolute perfection of his face. How shaking his hand made Paul feel as though all of the atoms in his body had aligned. It wasn’t lust, he told himself yet again. It wasn’t about sex. It was transcendent. It was spiritual.
The transcendent power of beauty. Moments of appreciating beauty. What did the Bible say about that? Most of the passages he managed to find did not have much to say about the appreciation of beauty.
“Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.” Ezekiel 28:17
“Do not let your adorning be external.” 1 Peter 3:3.
If he wanted to write about the dangers of being seduced by beauty, there was a lot of material there. People must need more reassurance that beauty doesn’t matter than reinforcement that it does. The transcendent power of beauty—deep aesthetic appreciation—surely the Bible had something good to say about that?
The Song of Solomon seemed promising. Ah ha! “Behold, you are beautiful, my love, behold, you are beautiful!” Good start. But then it went on: “Your eyes are doves behind your veil. Your hair is like a flock of goats leaping down the slopes of Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing.” Teeth like shorn ewes? Quite right. Powerful beauty makes us talk like idiots. Now there is a promising theme.
Forget Solomon. Forget beauty. New topic. He gazed out the window.
Why was this so difficult? He remembered how it had been when he was young and full of love for Christ. He was full of passion and wanted to tell everyone the Good News. He had had no problem speaking on any topic and bringing it back to Christ’s love. It had flowed out of him naturally. But he had been so arrogant. He had felt as though being faithful made him different. As if he had discovered Christ himself. “He died for my sins.” But then the arrogance of youth was completely ordinary too.
So how could he write that? How could he make people leave the church feeling uplifted with a message of being not special, but ordinary? He thought he just might have come up with the right lines to build the sermon around when Julie knocked softly and poked her head around the door. “Paul?” The thought disappeared like the traces of a dream when the alarm goes off in the morning.
“I thought I told you not to interrupt me!” He felt bad about snapping at her as soon as he said it.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but we have a problem. I was about to go home and I noticed that there’s a man sitting in the pavilion, and I think he is drunk. I was afraid to go up to him.”
Paul was actually relieved to have something besides the sermon to focus on. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll take care of it.”
Confrontation had never been his strong suit. He hoped he was not about to encounter a violent drunk. He took a deep breath. As he walked to the pavilion, he practiced his firm but gentle speech in his head: “You can’t stay here. There are some places you can go….”
By the time he got to the room, he was mentally prepared for a tattooed biker with scars on his face, shouting, swearing, throwing bottles. He was ready for anything, he thought. Anything but this: a slim figure sitting quietly on the floor, his right side lit by the warm orange rays of late afternoon sun, his arms folded loosely around his knees. His head was down, and his hair fell down around his face, completely obscuring it. But there was no doubt. It was his angel. Paul felt his heart skip a beat.
He sat down beside the young man, close enough to smell whiskey and cigarettes. He spoke softly. “Hi.”
The young man turned to Paul and squinted for a moment to get focus. Even with a furrowed brow and a face full of confusion, he was spectacularly beautiful.
“What’s your name?” Paul asked.
“Ian Finnerty.”
Ian. His name was Ian.
Paul was filled with a desire to take him into his arms, hold him, and protect him from all the evils in the world. He settled instead on resting a single hand on Ian’s shoulder. “My name is Paul…. Are you okay?”
“I’m just waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“The meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“AA.”
“There’s no meeting today.”