Winged Migration

Today, by happenstance, I took my walk far from our house and thus saw an area on foot too far away to reach. It was a splendid walk, blue sky, bright, a few puffs of cloud—and this after an unremitting ten, eleven days of overcast, drizzle, snow, sleet, overcast, drizzle, and so on. Along the way I passed St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, immediately adjacent to a huge golf course. The church had been built in 1947 and featured at one of its entrances a shield depicting St. Michael astride a winged horse, a shining lance held in his right, about to pierce a wicked-looking red devil on the ground below. The shield featured the wings in such strikingly white ceramic, they left an impression as I moved on, flanking the green of the golf-course to one side and an empty and almost unearthly silent up-scale neighborhood on the other, the only sounds coming from, well, winged birds.

Those wings and that horse together launched a kind of musing. I could not remember ever having seen St. Michael mounted—and on Pegasus at that. That didn’t fit; to take just one observation, a winged creature surely needs no mount to get about. Then it dawned that the horse meant to indicate high status, and what with the rider himself splendidly winged, the horse had to be winged too. And his own execution of these wings had evidently pleased the artist so that he lifted them by color—or the lack of it. Later, on the Internet, I confirmed my own take on the matter. No, St. Michael, although very often shown as air-borne, does not need to and therefore doesn’t ride. I am here reproducing a Dürer drawing of 1498 that resides today in the Kunsthalle of Karlsruhe in Germany. The drawing, curiously, reflects the very thoughts I had as I marched on.

One was that wings visually picture and thus symbolize a quality we have but cannot actually see—a spiritual nature. Indeed we share this nature with the angels and with devils too who, in depictions of St. Michael, always appear at least singly as Satan or as Satan and his followers—and as the antagonists of a great battle. And Dürer had it right: the devils also have their wings, but not such as you’d brag about. Dürer’s drawing is quite wondrous in that the country-side beneath this aerial scene is ordinary and quite peaceful. The battle rages in the air—in a hidden dimension, you might say, one that a peaceful peasant, too small to see in this etching, would not actually see if he looked up. But it is happening nonetheless—right inside him.

Yes, I thought, eventually—after my walk, proceeding in a huge three-mile ellipse, once more brought heavy traffic into view and therefore I would now be distracted—yes, I thought, we are engaged, aren’t we, in a winged migration of our own. And let’s not blame it on peaceful nature that Dürer also had sense enough to show quite realistically as something pleasing, unless, of course, that battle up above happens to descend and disfigures the countryside.

Just before I reached Vernier, the heavy artery, I passed North High School. It is located precisely at one antipode of my ellipse, St. Michael at the other. There, at North, outside the fence of this huge complex, I saw the following chalked in simple but legible letters across the sidewalk: DOES GOD KNOW ME? And beneath it, by way of signature: MORMON.ORG. Angel Moroni meet Angel St. Michael?