An Inclusive Litany

1/12/96

Richard Leviton in Earth Star, a periodical freely distributed in the Boston area, December/January 1995-1996:
If you were an angel, how would you write your name on the Earth so people could read it? I mean, if you were an angel for whom a name is an energy, a sound, a power, and an assignment, how would you write a living letter to men and women who spend their days in worry and doubt?

For you, a thought is a reality, an intention is an act, an idea is a creation, and you have all the thoughts, intentions, and ideas of the world at your command. Let's say you have an alphabet of symbols and pictograms at your fingertips, like so many neon signs floating numinously in the ethers where you live. And let's say you wanted to impart the gentlest angelic kiss upon the face of Nature by swirling a field of ripe grain into one of your many signs but without breaking a single stalk. With your breath you will sculpt the seeds of life itself into a beautiful pattern, an invocation.

You know well that your heavenly beauty carries a little jolt of terror for us. Angels bring terror and beauty, said the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. "For beauty is only the beginning of a terror we can just barely endure"—the recognition of a "stronger presence." But you are so finely subtle. Your terror is really the beauty of awakening, the jolt of pure reality, and you say, making circles instantaneously in the grain, "Look, how close we are."

These thoughts came to me the other morning as I sat on my porch looking at pictures of the crop circle phenomena in England....