Entertaining Angels

 

There’s a verse in the Bible about hospitality that sticks with me. It’s from the book of Hebrews. And it goes like this.

“Don’t forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing; some have unwittingly entertained angels.”

Angel showing up out of the blue seems to be the way it always happens with angels, at least in the Christian scriptures. At Abraham and Sarah’s place, at Mary’s parent’s house, in Joseph’s dream.

Always unexpected, always catching people unawares.

“Don’t be afraid”, they always say.

“Then stop surprising people”, I want to say.

But my expectation of the way in which angels might show up meant that I couldn’t see it when it happened to me. If it happened to me, I should say.

I can’t say that I’ve ever entertained an angel but if you were to ask me if I’ve ever been entertained by one, that’s another story.

I was 23 and travelling in Italy one summer.

My trip began in Rome, where I was staying with a family in the hills above the city. On the first full day of my trip, I went into the city by train and spent the day exploring. The plan was that in the afternoon, I would take the train back to their town and meet them for dinner.

I knew barely any Italian, but I had a map, I had a phrasebook, and I knew that I had to be at Termini Station in Rome on the platform for track 17 for the five o’clock train back to their town.

I was there in good time. The train arrived, I boarded it, and it left the station exactly on time. I settled in my seat, took out a book, and began to read.

About 20 minutes later, I looked up. Where I was expecting to see the city turn to the countryside with hills ahead, I saw only the city. The dome of St. Peter’s at the Vatican, which I knew from my map to be on the opposite side of the city from where I was meant to be, was just slipping past the window.

I had been at the right place at the right time, but it was clear neither the time nor the train were indeed the ones I needed.

I bundled my things together and rushed to the door of the train – and as soon as the train approached the next station and began to stop, I would be ready to leap out and cross the platform to catch the next train heading back to Termini.

There’s a well-known turn of phrase, a commonplace, that packs more wisdom than you think. Most commonplaces do. Most idioms and phrases stick around for a while because they hold some wisdom, some common sense, the kind that’s a good idea to carry around with you in your pocket, folded up in the meaning of a memorable phrase.

In this case, it would have been wise for me to have had a look out of the train window at the station as we were approaching, and perhaps, having seen it and sized it up, I would have decided not to alight at that particular station. I would have, as the phrase goes, looked before I left and then, having looked, stayed right where I was and got off at perhaps the next station.

Here is another commonplace, equally as memorable:

Hindsight is 20-20.

I leapt out of the train as the doors opened and made it to the centre of the platform before I realized I should have either stayed on the train or gotten straight back on. The train station was abandoned, desolate. It was too late, though. The doors closed, and the train pulled away from the station.

Only one other person had gotten off at that station. A man.

I was on edge. I began to look for a phone. This was a long time ago, long before cell phones. It was in the era of public phone booths. But at this station, every phone had been ripped off the walls of the booths. All that was left was the outline of where the phones had been.

I was on to my second or third booth, all empty, when I heard a yelp, a call. The man was a long way down the platform, near the exit. He pointed to the phone booth and shook his head. He said something that I couldn’t understand in a language I didn’t know. Then he pointed at me and made the gesture with his hand for the telephone and held it up to the side of his face like he was speaking on it.

I knew what he was saying. Did I want to use the phone? Yes, I nodded.

He pointed outside of the station and up a road that ran along the tracks. It was an industrial area that looked as abandoned as the train station. I shook my head. No way. I was quite happy standing here waiting for the next train back to town.

And then, on cue, there was a train approaching, except it wasn’t exactly pulling into the station.

Instead, it roared past. The man was shaking his head. No trains. He pointed again to me, then made the sign of a phone, then made his fingers walk in the air and then pointed up the road again. I shook my head. No. Then he pointed to himself with one hand. And he walked the fingers of that hand through the air.

That was him, walking. And with his other hand, he pointed to me, and he walked those fingers in the air, well behind his other hand. That was me, walking behind him. Then he made the phone sign again, and he pointed back to me. He would show me where the phone was, and he would walk far ahead of me to do it. That was what he was saying.

I looked again at the phone booths that only had cut wires and the outlines of where the phones had once been. Yes, I nodded. Telephone. I’ll go.

I followed him down the steps of the station and onto the road that ran alongside the tracks.

He motioned once again that he would walk ahead of me on one side of the road, and I could follow well behind him on the other side of the road.

Don’t be afraid. This is what he was saying. Thank you. He spoke to me in Italian and then in a language I didn’t recognise, and then he quickly changed to another.

Russian.

I shook my head. I asked if he spoke English. He shook his. He tried another, and then he tried French. By this time, we were on to the fifth or sixth language attempt.

“Do you speak French?” He asked.

“A little”, I said.

“Telephone, there,” pointing up to the top of the street.

I nodded.

We walked for a few hundred feet up the road. There was no traffic, no cars either travelling on the road or parked alongside it.We walked past empty buildings and warehouses. It was an industrial ghost town. I was somewhere that no one went. Somewhere no one wanted to be. I was somewhere that no one lived. Except, it seemed, this man that I was following diagonally, about 20 paces behind.

He wasn’t Italian, or at least not originally. I thought he might be from Africa, but I wasn’t sure.

At the top of the road in one of the buildings, there was a racket club with a name and an address, and the sound of rubber balls bouncing off walls and rackets. And there was a phone.

I rang my hosts.

They figured out the train schedule and told me the next train to set me back on my path to their home. It would arrive in about an hour.

“Train. One hour”, I tried to say to him.

All I had to do now was go back to the train station and wait. The man led me back down the road past the empty and deserted lots.

Halfway back to the station, the man stopped at a small building between two warehouses. It was almost a hut. It was so small it would have been easy to miss it. There was a woman standing outside. She was smiling, waiting for him. But it also felt like waiting for me.

“Sister”, he said. They motioned me to come inside. I shook my head. Train, one hour. They shook theirs.

The man spread out his hands, taking in the vacant industrial warehouse estate around us. The abandoned train station, the missing phones, the graffiti, the broken windows, the emptiness of the entire place.

“You’re going to wait here? Not safe.”

His sister motioned with her hand again.

“Come.”

I entered.

It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness of the interior coming out from the bright light of the afternoon. We were in a very small room, very plain. The walls were besserblock, concrete. The floor had broken linoleum. The walls had been painted long before, white presumably, but now marked and stained.

It was so spare, but tidy, clean.

There was a table with a few chairs. A worn out couch for two people at most, and in the middle of the floor was a playpen with two little babies, twins, hers.

They stood at the edge of the playpen, gripping its edge, rocking back and forth, smiling. They were the age that babies are when they can pull themselves up on the edge of some furniture, but before they began to walk.

The man greeted them with smiles and soft words. They understood. I did not.

He gently patted their heads. Uncle.

The man and the woman smiled at me and nodded their heads. Their smiles were so bright, so kind.

Welcome. Tea? Food? I shook my head. No need. Train. One hour. Even less now. No need to prepare something when I was going to be leaving so soon.

They smiled. Train. One hour.

The woman gestured to the small alcove that served as their kitchen.

“Tea, bread, drink, eat.”

“There is time”, he said.

“Thank you.”

The woman went to the kitchen and returned with a tray that she placed on the table, a teapot, some glasses, a plate with a round cake of bread. It was warm, fresh from the oven, and spiced.

She poured the tea and cut slices of the bread, and then she paused.

“We pray”, the man said.

I didn’t know them. I didn’t know what their religion was or to whom they would pray.

It could be Allah. It could be Buddha. It could be any number of saints or deities.

“Yes”, I said. I bowed my head.

He prayed in the first language that he had spoken to me, the one I’d never heard before. He said words I had no idea of their meaning. He prayed to what I assumed was a God I didn’t know nor would ever know. I had bowed my head out of respect to the man and his sister, not in belief. His prayer came to an end, and then he closed it with something I did understand, something I think I’d know in almost any language.

“Jesus Christus.”

When I opened my eyes, they fell on one of the only pieces of decoration in their home. It was placed on the walls of their home above the lintel of the doorway into the kitchen. It was a bumper sticker, in English, with two words on it.

“Jesus Saves.” Amen.

I smiled at them, and I tried to say the last two words of his prayer in his language; “Jesus Christus”.

I pointed to my heart.

“Jesus Christus”, he said, and he pointed to his.

Brother. Sister. Me.

I fumbled through my wallet. They were so poor. I wanted to give them money. They needed it more than I did.

“No”, he said. And somehow, in his perfect French and my limited knowledge of it, I understood what he was saying.

“We follow Jesus Christ. Our ways are not the ways of the world. We do not repay the way the world repays. You’ve received a gift from us. Go and give the same to another.”

His words redefined rich and poor for me and illuminated Christian love.

And from that afternoon, the way I thought about money and time, wealth and poverty, beauty and decay, and the power that can live in the simplest things, such as bread and tea, depending on what motivates our offering, all began to change.

We drank the tea and ate the bread – and as the end of the hour approached, they walked me outside.

The sister waved goodbye from the edge of the dirt outside their home.

The brother walked with me back to the station.

So much can change inside of an hour.

This time, we walked down the road, not one in front and one behind, but side by side.

I was not afraid.

Brother, Sister, in Christ.