Wings of Desire
It was a child’s comment to her father that started me off on a whole new way of thinking about Christmas. I was studying in the United States at the time, and ‘paying my way’ by ‘doing supply’ at a local parish in San Francisco. They were standing together in front of the crib. Musing to herself, her father heard her say, “I wonder if God enjoys being a baby.” Especially around this time of Advent, the child’s reflection often returns to me and fills my mind. These are the moments when I find the realization of what Incarnation means deeply overwhelming. The veil of the routine seasonal repetitions is briefly parted and the heart is caught off guard.
Another such moment happened last month. The Sunday Independent offered a free pre-Christmas DVD of an old film. In 1987 Wim Wenders won Best Director at Cannes for Wings of Desire. Wender’s post-war Berlin is full of pony-tailed angels who listen to, and comfort, the broken hearts and minds of mortals. On the verge of falling in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, one of them, Damiel, (against holy orders) becomes fascinated with the possibility of becoming human. Told from the angels’ point of view, the film is shot in black and white, blossoming into colour only when the angels perceive the realities of human kind.
It is wonderfully touching to be privy to Damiel’s musings about what it must be like to become really real, to experience surprise, to feel the cold, to hold an apple, to be touched, to take the one he is falling in love with in his arms. As he observes our human ways his desire grows stronger. One day he finally crosses over and becomes flesh. Like a baby, or a just-dropped calf, he struggles to keep his physical balance. It is a moment of pure discovery. He runs, he skips. Grinning broadly he breathes deeply and feels his mouth; he rubs his hands together, making little sounds like ‘Ah!’ and ‘Oh!’. Accidentally he bangs his head and fascinated, he stares at the blood on his fingers and tastes it with delight. ‘Is this what red is?’ he asks a passerby.
Like a child opening its presents on Christmas morning, Damiel reels and rocks under the delightful experience of each of his senses. He is ecstatic in his newly-found humanity. His friendship with Marian grows stronger. By now the film is all in colour. The infectious exuberance of the angel-made-human, whether sucking on an ice-cream, splashing on a puddle, staring at the colour purple, is fired with the enthusiasm of a child’s first wonder. You sense a simplicity and an innocence in his delight at being alive, in his appetite for new experiences, especially the experience of loving someone. ‘It is the love between us that has made me human’, Damiel reflects, ‘That night I learned to be astonished. I now know what no other angel knows.’
The child in California wondered whether God enjoyed becoming a baby. Maybe the love-story of Damiel is an echo of the love-story of God. Maybe God, too, in the beginning, in the loneliness of infinity, yearned for playmates. “God is sheer joy,” wrote St Thomas Aquinas, ‘and sheer joy demands companionship’. Could it be that God created the world in the first place because of a burning desire to be exactly like one of us, and so, to experience everything that human beings experience? Just as the committed love between women and men creates the new life of a baby, so too, the divine essence of extravagant and unconditional longing for human love, gives birth to the world and to everything and everyone in it. ‘God possesses the heavens’, wrote W.B. Yeats, ‘but he covets the earth. Oh! . . .he covets the earth.’ Von Balthasar, the ‘theologian of beauty’ wrote about Incarnation as the fleshing out of ‘God’s eros, God’s jealous, ravenous and loving desire for us.’
Imagination is the key to unlocking the undreamt-of beauty that lies behind the question of that wondering child. It was from the untamed wildness in her heart that her quiet reflection came. She was able to form it before we told her the wrong answers, before we boxed shut her creative soul and locked up her wild wonder. Her musings came straight from the divine imagination, still fresh as a daisy in her childhood essence. She sensed the impatience of God with divine invisibility; the need of God to be seen and heard. Unfortunately, our preoccupation with the secondary issues of the season blinds us to the many splendoured thing at its centre. With unseeing hearts, we miss the shattering and shocking revelation of the crib.
I do not know what the child’s father might have said to her. Hopefully very little. Still free, her untouched soul was already moving unerringly and deeper into the beautiful mystery. In her small heart she may well have continued to wonder whether God longed for the playful experience of being the body and soul of everything – of all shapes and sizes, all colours and textures, all levels of life and all shades of imperfection? Maybe she was wondering whether God, the author of difference, the artist of transformation, longed to experience what it was like to change – from small to bigger to big, like acorns that grow huge, like tadpoles that become frogs, like baby snakes that stretch long and small giraffes that reach tall, and like babies of every colour that beam brighter and bonnier with each passing day.
We ourselves, one of these misty evenings, need only tune in to the puella aeterna in our own souls, to hear the same questions. Did God come to us on the wings of desire, not reluctantly and with regret, as we were often told? Did God come to us with a passion for our human senses, to see and be seen, to touch and be touched, to understand and to be understood? Did God yearn to fall in love in a human way, to feel the shock of forgiveness, to say ‘I believe in you’, to be transfigured by courage and to shed the blood of fear?
This brings a final question: did God the Mother, in her ‘sheer joy’ at becoming a baby, desire also the consequences of her planned vulnerability – that her outrageous love would soon lead her down that Jerusalem road, and up that Calvary hill, where a terrible cross of despair was being prepared for her in the broken body and tormented soul of her beloved, grown-up child?
‘I wonder if God enjoys being a baby,’ our small mystic reflected beneath the fixed star and the floating angels. As her heart was still and silent before the mystery, did she begin to sense that she herself was that baby, that she too, shone with the same light, that her own young body and heart were home to a delighted God, and that the winters of her life would always reveal an inevitable spring? And was this miracle true of everyone? Were we all, unknowingly, as full of God’s beauty as the baby was? And if we really believed that all of this is true, how do we keep hurting each other, and destroying peace, like we do? How could anything ever be the same again?
Dear reader, maybe if we reflect on this Christmas (we have just experienced) we can allow ourselves, like God and like the young girl in our story, to be astonished at what we have taken for granted for far too long: to be deeply transformed by our new vision of the dark beauty and bright wonder of the divine humanity we are all graced with.