(With apologies to Sr. Elias)

I've given up trying to give the person a name, a face, or even a gender: names, faces and genders are all human attributes, and this figure is not properly human. So sometimes it's a man, and sometimes it's a woman. If it's a man, I visualize him sitting in an elegant, darkened hotel room working on his laptop on some sort of presentation he's due to give. He's clearly a deal-maker, an executive, someone with important responsibilities. He's the sort who knows about investments and has a fat retirement savings fund. He gives 200%--never fails a client, works weekends and nights to get the job done, is steady and keen and percipient. To balance the stress, he jogs at lunch, works out twice a week, plays a killer game of squash. He watches his diet like a hawk, never touches alcohol, and he's flat-bellied and perfectly fit.

Sometimes the figure's a woman. I see her striding briskly across a plaza, her navy briefcase (perfectly coordinated with her crisp size-6 wool suit) swinging, her high heels tapping. Even in this wind, her glossy hair falls back into place becomingly, and her mouth glows with colour. She is on her way home, where she will whip up a raddochio salad and imported rotini with a low-fat spinach pesto sauce, after which she will attend her daughter's dance recital. Her briefcase is as organized as her kitchen and her closets; her own surface is as smooth and uncluttered as the surfaces of her house. She is in control, busy but serene, and if her serenity lapses under the many calls of her life, she will take herself to a spa and be soothed back into her usual perfection.

Who are these people, anyway? Who made them perfect angels of this perfectionist, materialistic culture we're stuck with? Rationally, I know that they're only models: goodlooking people carefully posed and backlit and airbrushed, but wholly disconnected from any reality. So why are they so persuasive? Why have I half-bought what they present?

And just who gave them the right to speak inside my head, telling me what a mess I am compared to them? When I screw up with a project because my life is wrapped around my ankles, his voice says with an undertone of light contempt: "Please. We all have personal problems. They don't belong on the job." When I struggle to stay only three steps behind the mess, I feel her cool gaze on the back of my neck: "The key is organization and hard work."

I know, from ordinary exchanges, that there are other angels, ones that don't get to me but do get to others, like the slim big-haired girl who looks over her shoulder, saying: "If you only looked like me, you'd be happy." She sits on the shoulder of ordinary, healthy young women, with their smooth strong young bodies, and she whispers into their ears, "Fat! Ugly! Fat!" And some of these girls turn in their tracks and follow her all the way to death. Or there's the Perfect Mother, always on call for her children, ever patient, ever devoted, never tired or cranky, smiling gently when her little boy tracks thick mud over her sparkling kitchen floor. Or there's the Hearty Outdoor Man, or the Perfect Paterfamilias.... name your cold angel; there are dozens.

These are the people we're supposed to worth-ship, to give worth to, to try to make ourselves like. They are the Happy, the Fulfilled. They neither weep nor mourn. They do not grow old, as we grow old; they do not become thick-bodied or flat-footed. They never go bankrupt. Their health problems consist of the occasional cold, easily controlled with over-the-counter medications. Even in their lovely old age--discreet wrinkles, impeccable white hair--their teeth are perfect. They do not belch or bellylaugh or break wind or swell terribly with cancer, and if they cry, their noses probably don't run either.

Was thinking about these things down at the supermarket, and all around me stood the very ordinary folks I live around, the real people I share my world with, with their flat feet and drooping butts and pot bellies and potato noses and all, and not a successful hairdo in sight. (Even the women who try for Big Hair lack the necessary bounce and shine, and their complexions are never perfect.) And it occured to me that here's another layer of meaning to what Jesus said, "blessed be the poor". I can love those words, get my fingers dug into their meaning, at about 18 different levels, but this one had never occured to me:

You can't turn the poor into cold angels. Not successfully, anyway. About the most you can do is make them Exceedingly Worthy and Deserving, but that never seduced a soul. Nobody wants to be Deserving Poor, the way we want to be Rich and Beautiful and Competent and Successful. You're highly unlikely to look at the poor and see yourself as a failure by comparison--and if you look at them and see them as failures by comparison with yourself, I suggest you need to do some hard spiritual work.

Blessed are the poor; they are so human. These ordinary people around me--some are attractive, some are ugly (and some are astoundingly beautiful, although they'd never accept that). Some are bright, some are stupid; some are kind, some are cruel. Some have made good things with their broken lives; others are just broken. A handful are real saints, and a handful frighten me because there is a terrible vacancy in their faces. But they are all completely human. Not one is cold marble. Not one could be an icon. Not one could, by any reasonable standard, hold up his or her perfection as a standard against which the rest of us are supposed to judge ourselves and be self-damned.

Toss those cold angels overboard; put them behind you; look at them and blow a raspberry. Or look at them the way Luther looked at the Devil, sitting at the foot of Luther's his bed in the middle: "Oh. You again," Luther said, bored, and rolled over and went back to sleep. Following them makes us hurt ourselves, even to death. Put God where that image is, and look around at the real people in this hurting, glorious, wholly imperfect world, with the love God feels for us.

These cold angels are one way--one of the most subtly effective ways--by which this world works to seduce us into worshipping the wrong things. They are ultimately boring, because there is no heft to them, nothing real or substantial. They remind me that "human" and "humus"--dirt --- are very closely related words. Humanness lies in the grittiness of us.

Blessed be all who are human and admit it, and especially blessed are those who truly understand that others are human and love them for, not in spite of, that fact. And if you think you see an angel--if someone seems worthy to you--touch it. Real angels are warm and rough to the touch.