It will soon be Christmas and the angels will be singing in the churches and on the radio and on the streets. And I’ll be remembering a woman who sold me a camera during the year. She had split from her boyfriend and couldn’t bear to keep the camera he gave her last Christmas. When I use it I feel her presence; as if the lens inclines itself towards melancholic vistas of abandoned streets in black and white.
I know nothing about photography, apart from the fact that it’s all about seeing where the light is. The trouble is you have to hang around for a long time waiting for the light to be just right.
It’s a bit like writing. Writers show up in their solitary rooms and sit at blank screens waiting for something to arise on the page before them. So I couldn’t be bothered spending time hanging around streets when all I really want to do is write.
I love light more than vitamin D tablets, and I love when it shines on me, but I don’t want to spend the entire day waiting to capture it in a frozen image. So I don’t use the camera very much. Although when I do, I think of her. The camera was her symbol of sorrow and she wanted to rid herself if it.
I take angels very seriously, having met two in my life
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Grief can feel like being swallowed by darkness. It’s a place where there is no light. And I suppose Christmastime is a journey through the darkness for lots of people.
I used to dread wintertime, although I haven’t really been touched by bouts of depression for more than 10 years now.
Nowadays my Christmas is all about angels. I cling enthusiastically to the myth of angelic voices singing in the winter night about peace and joy. I suppose it’s amazing that it took me so long to take angels seriously. Even after I had met a couple in real life.
I had climbed Skellig Michael as a ritual. It was 2013 and I was in therapy and still desperate to shake off all the trappings of my old religious self
The first angel appeared to me as an artists’ model. I met her when she was working in the College of Art. I was heading off to be a priest. She was heading off to Paris to live in an anti-nuclear commune; a case of different strokes for different folks.
One day, years later, as I was about to flee from the church, a letter arrived from her, declaring that she was about to join a monastery. I was abandoning the ship and she was about to board.
“May the angels always enfold you in their tenderness,” she wrote, ending the letter. The phrase stayed with me. And I wondered if she herself might have been an angel, sent to encourage me at a crucial moment in life. The letter comforted me often on the precipice of various depressions.
Another angel I met was on Skellig Michael. Although once again I mistook him for a human being. I had been observing a drunk man stagger up the flagstone stairs, followed by an OPW official who feared he might cause trouble or just fall off the cliff.
At the top the drunk man leaned against a beehive hut to finish a bottle of wine. The official pleaded with him to desist. But the stranger claimed it was a feast day and that he wanted to celebrate with the monks.
I was standing beside him with a plastic cup that I was drinking water from. He turned to me, looking for an ally, and asked if I wanted some wine.
Initially I declined. Then he said, “I have a loaf of bread in my rucksack if you are hungry.”
I had climbed Skellig as a ritual. It was 2013 and I was in therapy and still desperate to shake off all the trappings of my old religious self. I wanted to find a rational space beyond the fog of superstitious faith. The climb was an act of farewell to all my old religiosity.
But the invitation to share wine and then bread changed my mind. I saw it as a sign I couldn’t ignore and, like the nun’s letter, the accidental exchange deepened my resolve to continue living by faith and ritual, rather than diving into the chillingly rational waters of modernity. So maybe the drunk man was another angel.
And maybe every casual stranger is an angel waiting for me to notice that the night is never so dark as to warrant despair, and that the light of heaven is hidden in every shadow, if only I could see it.