One day when I was a hospital chaplain ( at the Medway Maritime, Kent ) I was visiting a ward and an elderly lady called me over to her bedside. “Chaplain, please, could you be an angel ?” “How can I do that ?” I replied. “Well you see it is like this. I have been transferred up here this morning from that ward below, but I left me dentures behind ! And lunch is about to arrive. Please could you go down and bring them up for me ?” So I went and got them, brought them up the stairs to the ward, and she was grateful to be equipped for lunch. Then I thought, “that is a nice image of an angel” and I am still waiting for that icon to be painted of me climbing the stairs, carrying the dentures on a plate, and no doubt with silver wings attached to my shoulders.
As it happens, there is really an overlap between the services of angels and of human beings : the traditional collect for Michaelmas in the BCP prayer book puts it like this “ O everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order …”
You never know quite who you may come across, or where.
A Fall in the Shower
At a Gibraltar spa, 5th March 2025
Suddenly, with an unwelcome rush and a bump.
I found myself stranded like a beached whale
weighed down by my own fat !
Flat on my back !
And there I would surely have stayed,
incompetent of movement just
like one of those enormous hulks.
Yet un-whale like, my plight was not so desperate:
three angels quickly made their way across to help
and so a kind of raising up took place
thanks to angels’ grace.
And I say to myself : you accomplished something
in Gibraltar then ! You brought three angels
into being.
Not bad work, lying flat on your back.
