Angel Band

“O Come, angel band,

Come and around me stand;

Bear me away on your snow white wings,

To my eternal home;

Bear me away on your snow white wings,

To my eternal home.”

By Pearl D. Jones, sung by Stanley Bros. & others

This is a bluegrass tune that sings itself. The harmony is right there, waiting to be called upon, inviting us to throw our heads back and sing, trusting the notes because they are built into the structure of the multiverse, built into our histories, like our tonsils and our teeth. This harmony emerges from Nothing to draw us, free-floating space junk with no origin and no end in mind, draw us into the harmony-for-which-we-were-made, draw us from wherever our ashes have been scattered, from whatever mountainside they rest upon, untended to by all but the Angel Band who’s song this is- angels who are harmonizing even now, unnoticed and unheard, like frogs and insects lying dormant under January ground.

It is the same harmony that waits for us in St. Paul’s Chapel every morning before Morning Prayer, waits for us in the stones from which this church is constructed, in the weather outside, in our densely warming planet, and, obscurely,  in the deliberations of political parties.

“O come, angel band,

Come and around me stand…”

Such harmony is physical, like a grandmother’s embrace. We do not invent it… we inhabit it, and are borne away by it, as portable as air.

.

“Bear me away, on your snow white wings.”

Bear us away, bear them all away, the ancestors and friends and mentors and adversaries. Bear them away, bereft of breath, bereft of flesh, bereft of all but the harmony and the love.