Touched By An Angel
When I was way younger (10, 11-ish) I would attend the 6:30 a.m. Mass on Sundays so that I could be back home in time to watch a favorite TV series, Touched by an Angel. It aired on Sundays. I wouldn’t miss it, except on days when there was a temporary power outage. I loved that show; it’s about a group of angels—three of them—sent to earth from heaven on assignments to help humans. In each episode they would show up in the lives of the people they were assigned to, to help solve a case. Of course, their subjects were initially unaware they were angels. The angels would show up in guises of people from just about any walk of life. They would become someone the person, or a family, needs—and, in a delicate process, find a way to be part of their lives and help bring about the solution to whatever predicament. It is usually at the point of having solved the case that they reveal their identity as angels, declaring with the words “I’m an angel” while they are transformed in a halo of light, facing the person, or persons, who may or may not be astounded. (Not all the humans were impressed.)
The trio was a celestial fix-it team in human form. The elderly angel supervised the younger male and female angels. The man was the Angel of Death, charged with ferrying the dead to immortality; the other angel, a sweet-faced lady, was a junior angel who was more or less training on the job, facing the quandaries of dealing with humans, while having no experience of what it is to be a human person living a life on earth.
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My young mind had always wanted to believe in and escape into a world where everything was perfect, everything worked; and if that wasn’t the case, the idea of having powerful heavenly bodies to fix things up was consoling. I love an exquisite display of miraculous power. God and the rest of his team, I reckoned, must be about making things right for the humans and granting their every wish, regardless of the legitimacy. Calamities of all kinds were solved in this TV series, and the angels would literally drive off into the sunset in a snazzy red car, while the more experienced angels would field questions from the other angels, sometimes giving something of a performance review and pointing out valuable lessons from a case.
It was this cool TV show, until the common theme of happy endings changed in some of the subsequent episodes. Not every story, it turned out, was about the angels neatly fixing the problems of a person or family they were assigned to, not every encounter led to a “happy” ending. In fact, some challenges would confound the junior angel, who would then run to the more experienced one for counsel.
Sometimes there was death; other times, there were humans so onerous and irredeemable, uninterested in help or God, that they turned the angel's assignment into a tedious experience. These humans demanded simple answers to their tough questions; some were struck down by adversities, some in the stronghold of consuming addictions, quite resigned to their life of pending implosion. They weren’t in the mood for Good News. They had stepped over to the dark side, as it were, and were seemingly beyond help. Sometimes the angels had the unenviable task of convincing a person to live through what, on this side of heaven, one would deem to be the beginnings of an excruciating fate, and to accept it as God’s will. Sometimes these angels appeared to have arrived late: the young man has taken his life; the young lady has done something drastic, forever altering the course of her life. Sometimes they walked into a situation that would only worsen and end with collateral damage.. But every case had this ultimate mark of redemption. All was never lost, even though it seemed so.
These episodes were hard to watch. My perfect-world ideology and expectations would shatter like fragile glass in a hailstorm of reality. The cruel world of dealing with suffering made an appearance yet again and we (alas!) don’t have our happy endings.
In one episode a woman had lost her only child and was beside herself with grief. She couldn’t, for the life of her, understand why God would allow the only child she had to suffer and die. The angel on her case struggled to bring the woman to accept this reality. When she eventually revealed herself to the woman, bathed in a bright display of light, the angel had the woman’s baby in her arms. The baby now a citizen of heaven. She told the woman she was an angel, but it failed to soothe the mother, now a walking misery. She wanted answers. She wanted her baby. She wept in front of the angel, asking why God had taken her child from her. The angel didn’t have answers. I remember thinking, “Well, Angel Girl, you have her baby; hand it over to her and put the poor woman out of her misery” This mother, in losing her baby, had somehow lost her reason to live. She put it to the angel that God didn’t answer all of our prayers, and the angel told her that God indeed answers all our prayers, but sometimes the answer is “no.” It was my first time hearing that expression. I would grow to discover the explanations that come with that answer. God saying no to a prayer was to me, at that age, inconceivable. (Even though the answer to my prayers for a fancy wristwatch seemed to be taking too long.) I thought, Weren’t we supposed to just pray and pray some more, then get what we ask for?
As I said, I was about 10, 11 years old when I watching this show, an age when God was, in my mind, this genie that grants our request. Now if He was busy saying no to some of them, what am I to do? I thought. I might never get that wristwatch I was persistently praying for. My aptitude for Math will not improve and I’d keep getting disgraceful scores like 1/20. God might just say no to these requests.
I didn’t know it then, but that TV series planted seeds of knowledge of the human existence in relation to God. It taught me about a world, our world, where free will exists in humans—but these humans are meant to cooperate with their creator if they are to live their best lives. It taught me of a world, the real world, where suffering exists and will always exist but doesn’t have to be the end of the story for a Christian. It taught me of an existence that wasn’t perfect and wasn’t meant to be. Happy endings existed purely in the happy part of eternity. The TV show initially shattered my hopes, yet it ultimately propelled me toward a journey of transformation, redirecting my focus towards something solid, real, and eternal.
Decades later I find myself occasionally thinking about episodes from the show, and realizing that some things make sense now.