Gabriel the Archangel

Today would have been the feast day of St. Gabriel the Archangel (the day before the Annunciation) except that he got moved over to September 29th to share a day with Sts Michael and Raphael. Since I’m still wiped out from the weekend, I’m going to cheat share an old journal entry about the time I “met” St. Gabriel in a dream.

—

4/17/89

It started all weird, with a rich lord of a harem and other people. Then {a friend from  school} came up to me laughing, saying, “This guy is in your room — says he wants to speak to you — he says he’s the Archangel Gabriel!”

I felt nervous but I went in anyway, and the next thing I knew, I was talking with the Archangel Gabriel, giggling and having a good time.

In the middle of the revelry I stopped. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said, and my head hurt because it was hard to concentrate, “but I want you to say the Divine Praises.”

I meant to test him, to see if he was who he said. He replied: “Only one.”

I said, “Three.”

He said, “Okay.”

So he said three of the Divine Praises, or maybe he said them all because I can’t remember him stopping. But he said them weird. He said, for example, “Blessed be the Trinity,” and something like, “Blessed be the Patriarchs.”

I remember at one point sitting with him on the floor in my old room at {childhood home}. I was wearing my orange shirt, and I saw myself from outside myself. I was laughing.

I remember what he looked like: his hair was ashy-blond and short, almost a crew-cut. His face was roundish. His eyes were perfectly almond-shaped, and the irises were like smoke-quartz, a watery black-grey. He was almost effeminate, and his voice was soft and not deep.

I felt bad, because at one point I introduced him to someone, and I started laughing at the idea. He talked to {Stepfather} too, but I didn’t tell him who Gabriel was. I was afraid he’d laugh and not believe me. I was a little embarrassed.

I said to him later, in the most vivid part of the dream:  “Do you stop by often?” Then, as the dream began to fall apart around me, he looked me right in the eyes and answered, “I pray for you.”

The last thing he said was that it was good I was praying the St. Michael chaplet. But those eyes, those eyes were just locked on mine.

The dream slipped back into the other, and the evil harem-lord and someone else were being boiled in oil. I was joking around with the customer of the restaurant (“I wouldn’t eat the soup if I were you”) but then looked out the window into the street to find Gabriel, but I couldn’t. I woke up feeling absolutely alone, curled on my side, missing him terribly.

Later on, and even during the dream, I thought of things I had wanted to ask him but hadn’t. I wanted to ask him about that flower, but didn’t find the words. I wanted to ask him about the legend that he was once shut away from Heaven, even thought of the words, but he looked sad and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

But it had felt so good in the dream, like I was with a friend, someone who knew me and really cared for me. I think, looking back, that he was actually inside my mind, or I was sort-of within his.

It freaked me out in a way. I’m still a bit touchy inside.

—-

Commentary: This has stayed with me for years. At some point I need to check how many times in the Seven Archangels books an angel says “I pray for you.” It’s probably once per book.

I have no idea what the flower reference was. And back then, due to too much cheap SFF, I described everyone as having almond-shaped eyes.

The night I had the dream was the first time I visited Cornell, after getting accepted but before deciding to go there. 

I wanted to see him again. I prayed like crazy for reassurance, and that he would help me out (I was terrified of going away to college) and that he’d keep praying for me. And I prayed specifically that the first night I was in Ithaca, he’d come to me in a dream. I had total faith he would. And then when I went to college, I didn’t dream about him.  It was only afterward that I realized this was “the first night” I was in Ithaca, and that if you didn’t exist within a straightforward time stream, you might get this persistent request from a bratty teenager and eventually say, “Sure, it won’t take more than ten minutes,” and punch “first night in Ithaca, New York” into your blackberry and end up there in April rather than September. 🙂

So that’s my dream. What do you think?