I really enjoyed the story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is complex and contains many elements that symbolize something of a greater message and therefore needs to be interpreted. There are so many different aspects in this story that I will try to cover, but I am sure there will be things left in the dark, because even so I still do not understand it in its entirety. Whether it was intended to be or not, I took the story to be a very important message for Christians. Mainly, I think this story touches on two main issues: not responding to personal miracles in the correct way and how we respond to the supernatural.
In this story, the author used a simple universal symbol of an angel to represent the fullness of the supernatural. This angel had come to Pelayo and his family to bring a healing. It had been rainy and dreadful for three days and on top of that Pelayo and his wife Elisenda’s baby was sick. When the angle, which appeared to them as no one had expected, came to them the land and the child was healed. It has stopped raining and “a short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat.” How did they respond to this? Instead of being grateful of the miracle, they threw the angel in a chicken coop and were none the less afraid of him. I interpret this is how sometimes the church responds to miracles and the supernatural. No, we don’t watch our backs and keep it in mind to club God to death, but sometimes we are afraid of the Spirit of God to move. When He comes to us try and cover him up and shove him away. This happens especially when he doesn’t show up the way we want him to, just like the angel in this story.
The family and people who eventually came to see the angel were disappointed by his appearance. To them, he looked only like an old man with wings. There was nothing divine or lovely about him. Who says angles have to be young and admirable? Wasn’t Jesus said to be a not so handsome man himself? Not only in physical attributes, but as a society in this day and age our expectations of God are too high. Not that God isn’t as good as what we expect, but he doesn’t exist to meet our expectations. People had come from all over to see the angle, to experience the angel, but he did not act in the way he wanted to. Much the same God sometimes moves and answers prayers not always in the way we want him to. Because of that, we may respond in negative ways.
According to this story, another danger in response to the supernatural is making a show of it. In this case the angel’s presence had literally become a circus. They had a traveling carnival come in to add to the madness and because of the large amount of people showing up they charged to entry. They were making profit for themselves rather than giving glory where it is due. Also, there was a spider girl who was there to entice some kind of competition. This is like when people look to the world to satisfy their desires or the demonic to show them “real” wonders. As this story is filled with great examples of how ridiculous we act, one in particular caught my eye. I had previously talked about it in my blog but I want to mention it again. The line that says “the most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood had been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers, a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him, a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while he was awake.” This just points out how absurd our requests can be from God and the fact that these people weren’t healed by the angel show failure on their account, not him. It made me think of how people claim that Paul “lost his power to heal people,” when what he did was tell them the obvious, not to drink the water because it was making them sick instead of performing some miracle. The hype ended when no true miraculous signs were performed and the family was left very wealthy…sound like the American church today?
The story ends with the angel flying away. The family learned nothing from their experience with the angel. Before the leaves though, it the child comes to visit him in the coop, and he doesn’t even respond to the child. This paints an amazing picture of how God doesn’t leave us, he is still there, but when you resist him for too long he won’t move in your life. When the angel started growing his wings back he didn’t even want to family to see. Their expectations of a glorious angel would come true and since they didn’t receive him before he wasn’t going to reveal his beauty to meet their wants. At the very end Elisenda was relieved for the angel to leave, but the last line says that she watched him go away and not he was “an imaginary dot in the horizon.” At the end of it all, some people want to just adore God from far away rather than having him dwell in our lives personally, even after fully experiencing him. This could be because its too much for us to handle, or it come to the point or being so redundant that the supernatural isn’t that “super” or filled with awe anymore. At the beginning it said that the family observed the angel for too long they found him familiar. Don’t let your relationship with God and his supernatural power become too familiar! He should become new to us each day so that we can give him even more glory
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