Excerpt
The angel came to me on the sad and sweltering August afternoon of my 23rd birthday. I felt the tender press of its body against the defeated curve of my back. Its body was as cool and soft as my grandmama’s hands and smelled of rain. Its wings pulsed with the heartbeat of the Divine.
I knew the angel had come to tell me something, so I lay still and listened.
It spoke a miracle.
“Pippa,” it said. “You are highly favored. The Lord is with you.”
The angel’s voice sounded sweet and clear and absolutely real. Its words entered my head through my ears, like any ordinary sound. I thought my heart would stop, but the angel reassured me.
“Do not be afraid, Pippa, for you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a daughter.”
“Gabriel?" I whispered. “Are you Gabriel?”
The angel didn’t answer.
“Gabriel, it’s not that I doubt you, but I haven’t been able to conceive for three years now.”
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, Pippa, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called Grace, the Daughter of God.”
I turned to look into the face of the angel, but as I moved, it rose into the air above me. I saw an iridescent swirl of green robes, of golden wings, and a smiling face of infinite love. Though I tried to keep it in my gaze, the angel dissolved into the ceiling and was gone.
The angel came to me when I had been wallowing in the slough of despair for several months. It was a drearily familiar place to me, one I had visited often during my efforts to conceive.
My husband, Aiden, didn’t share my enthusiasm for parenthood. I stopped taking the Pill without his knowledge. He was not ready, he said, for such as enormous responsibility. He liked his carefree lifestyle.
I envied his buoyancy. Like a child who has lost a balloon, I sadly watched his light flight through what seemed, to me, an easy and privileged life.
Miserable and disappointed, I began to think that the devils of depression would always grip my ankles and slow my steps as Aiden went skipping along ahead of me. It seemed to be my fate.
I tried to pray my way through the depression. I asked God for His guidance. If He would not grant me motherhood, perhaps he would show me how to accept childlessness. I never heard Him answer, which I understood to mean “No.”
But I wanted a baby in the worst way. Baby food advertisements and toddlers in strollers made me cry; I watched pregnant women with sharp envy.
I thought I was well made for the job of mother, made of lush flesh: ripe melon breasts and a wide cradle of hips. Rich soil for Aiden’s seed. Yet nothing would grow in our impoverished garden.
When the angel came to me, I had pretty much given up on having a child. I had given up on almost everything. Gabriel’s news was a divine favor. The child would give me a grip on life again.
After my angelic visitation, I went to the mirror to see if I had changed, if I now looked like a mother. My face gave me no clues, but I believed Gabriel’s prediction. I embraced the angel’s truth with my heart, soul, and both arms. I would become a mother -- I might already be the mother -- of a seraphic daughter named Grace.
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