Title: Tongues of Men and Angels
Rating: TA for implied?romance.
Summary: Glimpses of grace: the story of one brother and two sisters. Through the grace of God, all things are made new.A series of drabbles. Ish. Gabriel/OC. Ish.
Disclaimer: *obligatory insert*
Interlude: Wake
Jesus wept.
John 11: 35
He held her on the roof of a different house that night, one he had found at random and hoped was habitable. In the darkness, he kept vigil over her as she had once done for him. They said nothing, lapsing into the silence that had once so deeply characterized his times with Joy. Quietly, she wept, and he wept beside her; she scrubbed her face roughly with her fists until he held onto her wrists, his own hands becoming gentle manacles. He thought that they could water the desert, that they might flood the parched sand until they drowned together in their shared salt. He imagined she could see nothing but the vast ocean of her own grief—which he imagined must be just like his, and moreso.
He held her wrists. He murmured into her hair. He breathed in the scent of their tears, as bright and hard as desolate stars.
She raised her bruised-looking eyes to him. "What is it you are saying?" she asked, and her voice was reedy and thin.
He hesitated in the darkness. "It is an angelic psalm," he answered after a moment of stillness. The desert air lay heavily upon them.
"It sounds beautiful," she whispered, but the words were sodden with grief. "What does it mean?"
He stared down at her. "You know this already," he said reluctantly, and did not know why he was apprehensive, suddenly so-self-conscious at his meager offering of words.
"Tell me anyway," she whispered, and it was a plea he could not ignore.
Still, he hesitated, and when he spoke again his voice seemed to fill all the crevices between the shadows, and perhaps—he thought—perhaps with this, he could call her through the night much as she had once called to Joy.
"Yea," he said, and his chest rumbled beneath her cheek, "though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me."
He breathed in deeply, and she lay still against him, and he hoped the familiarity of these words might ease her ache, that the meaning behind them might soothe her heart.
"You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup runneth over."
He lifted one hand: it trembled as he laid his palm very carefully against the crown of her head, feeling her hair like wisping silk between his fingers. His voice grew very quiet, and very low, and very full and aching.
"Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life—and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever and ever."
In these last words, he felt her stir. His hand retreated quickly from her hair, yearning for something he could not name—but she turned in his arms and studied his face as though she would memorize every line of it, cut starkly against the lonely moon. Fingers splayed, she had reached out to him soundlessly, her fingertips whispering on five starlike points of his face before her palm softened to cup his jaw. In that moment, he saw that in spite of her own pain, she had recognized his.
Just—she had said once—let me do this one thing for you.
The touch felt like absolution.
Lo! I tell you a mystery:
we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.
For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.
For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality.
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
"Death is swallowed up in victory."
1 Corinthians 15: 51-54
oOo
Word Count: 561
Completed: May 16th, 2011
Chapter 24 (Beloved): Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) is subject to many interpretations (that Solomon wrote it, that it was aboutSolomon and a member of his harem, that it was about a shepherd-boy and a Shalumite girl who worked in her brothers' vineyards, and of course, that it is actually about God and the Israelites (or Christ and Church), etc. For the purposes of this fiction, I combined and altered some of these interpretations. ****Beloved is a multilayered title. Clearly there is the allusion to Joy, whom Gabriel loves (and whom he tells this to). It is also an allusion to the female character in Song of Songs, who is called "the Beloved" (and would be Bethany). This verse was carefully chosen from the same book. [c. Song of Solomon]
Chapter 25 (The Longest Night): Much of the possessing angel's dialogue was adapted (and occasionally lifted wholesale) from Psalm 137, Genesis 19, and John 8. ****The title is an allusion to the night of the Last Supper, just prior to the Crucifixion. On this night, Jesus ate his last meal with his friends, acknowledged his betrayer, went and prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, was betrayed by a kiss and taken into custody, was denied three times, and began the trial that would eventually lead to his death. It is also—clearly, I think—about the night that Joy was angel-possessed, and Bethany held her for hours on end. [c. Mark 14]
Chapter 26 (Viaticum): ****Viaticum is the final aspect of the three parts that comprise the Roman Catholic Church's Last Rites. It is the dying person's last reception of Eucharist, and the term is Latin, meaning provision for the journey.
Interlude 8 (Wake): Gabriel's psalm is, of course, the famous 23rd. I looked for ages to find something rarer, but I thought nothing was as fitting or as poignant, and that nothing would comfort Bethany as much as the familiarity of this funeral reading, a haunting eulogy whispered by an angel in the desert. ****The wake refers to the time after death but prior to the funeral, when family members kept vigil over their loved one. There is some debate over the original purpose of the wake (including the general and secular belief that it was to ensure that the deceased was "really dead" before burying them). However, many scholars believe it was originally practiced in response to the story of the Garden of Gethsemane, where—on the night he was betrayed—Jesus asked his friends to keep watch over him while he prayed. [c. Mark 14]