GABRIEL always Gabriel because of all the narratives about angels, Gabriel’s leans closest to humanity. Gabriel who translates between the Word and the messy inexactitudes of human language—we are creatures of connotation and context; our vocabulary is slantwise, all ill-defined shapes and inexact transliterations. We barely understand one another, and yet angels are messengers, bending right angles into fractals just to try and express a fingernail of what the Lord said.
But Gabriel speaks; Gabriel bends low and whispers; Gabriel tries harder than any other to understand. And as a consequence I think Gabriel loves a little differently than the other angels, because human love is like human language—messy and inexact and shifting; powerful when wielded by one who knows its power.
Gabriel who is sent to deliver the good news to the Mother of God without sin; Theotokos and the Queen of Heaven—and gets Miriam of Nazareth instead.
(She’s slender and sun-browned and faithful, but not a queen—just a girl like any other from a backwater Judean town. And Gabriel basically follows her around for nine months trying to figure out how this human becomes the mystical figure the angels were told she was, where she’s keeping her grace and power and wisdom hidden.
It’s Gabriel’s hand she holds while giving birth—her nails would have drawn blood, if he had any—it’s Gabriel who laughs when she tells him the story of her friend’s wedding, the water into wine and her impertinent son—it’s Gabriel who holds her when the news of Yeshua’s arrest reaches Nazareth and it’s Gabriel who walks beside her on the long road to Jerusalem, to watch her son crucified.
She is still sun-browned and faithful, and Gabriel thinks maybe that is the point.)
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