It is not by our own will that grace comes into our world. It is unasked for. It is unbidden. It is not in response to anything. It’s
too wild, pure, and mad for that.
Grace invades.
The angels are an occupying army in our world. They are light that bursts upon us in our darkness, lifting up what we would rather abandon to its misery. They are the flowers of Heaven, blooming where the world had forsaken life — on the scrapheaps of metal, in the slick sickness of spreading oil, on the graves of sinners and the just, twining up our skyscrapers and our tenements and our office buildings in defiance of the soullessness of our lives. They are the enlightenment that bursts in on us when we were just trying to be small little men and women, eating our bagels and drinking our Starbucks, tilling our little patches of soil, dying in our heaps and grottoes, or staring out at the world from our high towers. We didn’t ask for it. We didn’t even understand that it could happen. It was like a Zen master suddenly hitting us with a stick while we were just in line to pay the telly bill. Heaven is the angel that catches us as we fall; not because we needed it, not because we wanted it, not even because we’d dreamed of angels since we were a child but because the angels decided the world was better if we lived.
Heaven invades, but at least it invades us as a holy thing.
The angels take beauty as a sacred trust. It’s their Craft and their Great Working, it’s what they build. Having found themselves born into the brightest land in all the lands there are, they decided they would make everything else as bright. Their own kin — lovers, friends, ancient acquaintances and enemies — are suffering in Hell, twisting and corroding into monsters, and still they speak of justice and righteousness in the world. Their blood is the favored stain on Excrucian blades; of all the creatures of the Ash, they alone may never escape the constant press of the War, may never anticipate a week, month, year, when nothing of theirs is threatened by the gods of emptiness; and still they labor to better us. They take the time to bring grace to where it is most efficaciously transformative, to will the betterment of the world and of our lives and our places and our existence, effulgent unasked, undreamt-of and invasive grace.
They will make this world a Heaven. They expect no less of us.
The wildflowers of Heaven rip through the substrate of the world to bloom in impossible places. They are hard on the cruelty of the world; they make it hard to be petty, hard to be small, hard to be human in their presence, much less genuinely wicked. They make your own soul and dharma writhe within you if you ignore the power of their witnessing.
And they will give you strength, if you let them.
If you are willing to let them transform you. If you will take the strength they offer you, at the cost of giving up your weakness; if you will take the chance to become a hero, at the cost of no longer being normal; if you are willing to be better, at the cost of never again being what you were — they will make you something more.
They will make you purer. They will make you cleaner. They will find the thing inside you that you ought to be and clean away the detritus of the self. They will energize you, brighten you, make it impossible for you to hide from the beauty of your soul, but wrack you with it, rather, possess you of it, make you burn with the awesome amazing thing that is a person, that is you, a child of the Heaven-they-will-make, in the perfection of this world.
They are flowers that take from you the power to compromise with wickedness and mediocrity, to be comfortable with evil and others’ suffering, in exchange for renewed life.