"Thy Gracious Will"

Poets and scientists share a conviction: that truth, the essence of a thing, bears as its hallmark, simplicity. By contrast, long and round-about explanations or solutions are self-evidently remote from truth or essence. Mathematicians use the term elegance to denote this maximum expressiveness rendered in minimal notation. Brilliance, then, is seen in simplicity.

Consider then that the unmediated world is a tangle of verbose confusion. The mind that reduces this dross to ore and thence to gold refreshes us and inspires us. This mind sees past the clutter to reveal the essences of thing. And when he does, everyone sees it with a sense of relief. we marvel at the gem-like diamond-hardness of the sonnet or the haiku. So much said in so few words. "Brevity is the soul of wit," said the Shakespeare wisdom figure, Polonius in the play Hamlet.

Consider, then, Eden as simple, elegant, a place of essences — Heaven's concise goodness distilled into earthly forms and words and thoughts. The world had been "without form and void" (Gen 1:2). And then the Poem of poems, the most simple and expressive Word in the universe, God's own Name, was spoken into it rendering the purest gold and the clearest diamonds from the foulest dross and slag. The Poem of all poems, the Essence of all essences, Simplicity Itself, God.

When good and free Man and Woman became fascinated with evil, consenting to it, a gore was opened in God's world of goodness, and the raw chaos from which God had rendered His world flooded back in with a poisonous stench unabated. Chaos would again have the upper hand with evil as its dominating spiritual principle.

Eons later, in the eighteenth century, surveying the internal laws of this world, Sir Isaac Newton observed that every random event contributes to the disorder of the universe, which he termed entropy. In the nineteenth century the great physicist Rudolph Clausius famously articulated, "The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum." Why do stones rolling down a hill not gather in neat piles? Why does a garden hose continually become tangled? Why does new, silvery steel soon become pitted and rusty? Why? Because the increate void upon which God had stamped Heaven's Image is inherently chaotic. Following Eden chaos has returned; everything now tends to chaos.

As Newton asserted, this chaos is seen everywhere in everything. We might add that the same principle is seen in the drama of human relationships, too. When good devotion is supplanted by betrayal, goodness is abandoned, overtaken by fascinating evil. The world that followed the fall of Eden grew darker and darker until chaos had become the rule:

The rest of the story is too long to tell. God, of course, would not abandon His precious human creatures to their darker selves.

The universe tends to disorderliness unto a maximum. But goodness blazes in the darkness through the undaunted human spirit with hopes of shining cities ever nurtured in the human heart. And amongst these good people roam the angels of Heaven.

Yes, demons also remain who in their freedom arrogated to seize Heaven's orderliness with deadly tumult, now exiled to the void of earthly chaos. Indeed, their aggregation, all demons, is synonymous with earthly disorder: pandemonium. Whichever mind tends to evil continually has already invited chaos into his or her life. Whichever mind wrests goodness in its crystalline simplicity from the world of dust has already befriended angels. The Archangel Michael, Prince of the Heavenly Hosts, draws a line with his sword between demonic chaos and the good world of angels. "The armies of God do battle with the forces of darkness of which this world is but a pale reflection," wrote the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton.

We long to hear the words of Heaven, and who speaks more trenchantly than an angel? So little is said; so much conveyed. It is not the case that Heavenly truths require more human words, but fewer ... unto mindful silence. Merton wrote that "The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it."

Ever-virgin Mary heard Gabriel's few words and then "considered in her mind" what these might mean? (Lu 1:29) She pondered these trenchant meanings in her heart for the rest of her earthly life (Lu 2:19).

In the Book of Tobit, the Archangel Raphael unravels a particularly tangled mess of marriage wringing rightness from a confusion of demonic influences. But the Archangel whose feast we celebrate today (a synaxis established outside of Lent that celebration might be unbounded), St. Gabriel, bears that most wonderful mantle

of announcing the entrance of truly shining lives into our world. Have you ever met a truly special person — someone whose humility, simplicity, graciousness, and mindfulness run deep and true and never vary? Never an unkind word, never an uncharitable act. They seem to walk on air. They are comfortable in their own skin, imperturbable and wise. People are drawn to them. If a boy, other boys seek him out, and girls want to "have" him. But no one can have him, for his life belongs to God. And no one fails to see this ... over time.

If a girl, she is the one that a clear-eyed boy wants for his wife, but her destiny is not marriage. Even her parents know from her adolescence that she is destined for God ... as a vowed religious, perhaps, or a cheerful and undaunted missionary. I have met one of these in my life, only one. And I was not surprised that this girl, a radiant beauty from young adulthood, never accepted a proposal of marriage. From girlhood, she knew that her future was the convent. And there she would be special among the other sisters ... and from the convent to the Third World and the Fourth World.

In later years, people flooded her ministry with donations because they had met her and for the first time in their lives had seen and spoken with the "real thing." Their faith in the Church had been renewed, and their hearts and treasure would follow.

Have you met a truly special person? I ask you, what on earth could ever express Heaven's presence more concisely than such a life? Humans alone in the material creation have a capacity for holiness. What more trenchantly speaks Heaven's goodness into the world than a shining life?

This was St. Gabriel's vocation: to announce the conception of the most special lives in human history: the God-man, Jesus Christ; the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, who "among [those] born of women there hath not arisen ... greater" (Mt 11:11); And on one other occasion, when an unnamed angel (Gabriel, we infer from precedent and analogy) appeared to St. Joachim and to St. Anna to reveal the conception of the Most Holy Theotokos. These three. Jesus Christ, the Son of God and gracious exemplar of the ideal manly form. St. John the Baptist, whose appearance caused a revolution of godliness in Palestine. And the Woman wrapped in silence, the Most Holy Mother of God. Go into any Orthodox Church and you will find these three lives attested upon the iconostasis. On the right side of the Beautiful Gates, you will find the Lord Jesus as Pantokrator and on the left the Most Holy Theotokos. In the center the Deisis with Christ enthroned attended by the Theotokos and St. John the Forerunner. On the Deacons' Doors most often you will find St. Michael and St. Gabriel.

In his commentary on Maximos the Confessor, The Mystical Marriage, Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra (the Athonite) wrote,

God Himself attests in the story of Job, upon one shining life depends the goodness and purity of the world. A mystery ... on one shining life depends the goodness and purity of the world. When we meet such a person, we are restored. The mind is cleared. We get back our bearings. And Heaven, once more, seems possible.

Can we therefore say that the Archangel Gabriel's office is to announce hope into an otherwise troubled, and troubling, world? The greatest and most potent hope? His office is clarity. He appeared to Daniel to help him understand the meaning of his visions, which tells us that, at first look, the divine is not intelligible to us. St. Ignatius of Antioch, among the earliest of the Fathers to write on angels, warns us that the mystery of angels is so weighty as to "strangle" us (Letter to the Trullians). Gabriel's name means "God is my strength." The great Father St. Irenaeus saw this strength in terms of clarity:

As the Lord Jesus reveals in a prayer to God the Father, "It is Thy gracious Will" that the gift of Heaven be not attained through affluence or power or fame or wrung from complexities. It is a gift opened to innocence. The shining, the true, the real ... are not these the constant yearnings of the simple mind and soul? Here is divine life. An angel of the Lord stands mongst the dust. He stands at a gate welcoming good souls who long for simplicity and clarity.

St. Gabriel, we pray for your missives from Heaven, for we long to see divine light and goodly order in a world gone mad. Pray for us, St. Gabriel and all Archangels, pray for us, Most Holy Theotokos, Regina Angelorum.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.