Friday, July 27, 2007

Angel Tutorial - Part Four

Gabriel and the True Language of Angels

I meant to make one other point in my Angel Post 3 about Gabriel. Angels, by their nature, constantly praise God. When angels (and I'm talking about angels other than the guardian angels) speak to humans, they continue to praise God throughout their speech. You can think of it as their praise of God becomes punctuation and accent marks to their speech they are making to humans in human language.

This is one way that you can identify when you are truly reading scripture that includes angel speech. For example, Gabriel hailed Mary as "full of grace," which is a title for Mary but one that is based upon praise of God. Gabriel did not hail Mary as "the slimmest of women" or "woman with the best hair," but he gave her the ultimate praise of characterizing her as filled with the key attribute of God, grace.

In the Old Testament we overhear the angels praising God, as they continually sing "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts." This lives on and is imitated in the liturgy of the Mass, "The Sanctus." Angels continually speak their praise of God because that is their form of breathing, thinking, feeling, and speech.

So this is one of the ways that a reader can have total confidence that the prophet (Peace be unto him) was given the Qur'an by the angel Gabriel, because you can see Gabriel's punctuation in the form of praise of God (Allah) throughout. For example, the frequent use of the word "surely" is an angelic speech punctuation for constantly stating the total certainty in Allah. Another example is the frequent closure of a passage with praises such as "Allah is merciful, wise." A third example is the overall structure of the Qur'an as a discourse, not a chronology from start to finish, where the discourse liberally combines, often sentence by sentence, a fact with a phrase of praise.

There is no shortage of praise and worship speech in the Bible, but there is an increasing gulf between how the angels and the prophets speak with or about the Lord, and how many Christians emulate that devotion. Too many Christians ignore the example set by the angels, yet think they will join the angels in praising God, after a lifetime of not praising him on earth. What? And look at the resentment by some toward even reintroducing Latin in the liturgy of the Mass. People memorized the Qur'an front to end, and did not edit out the words of praise for convenience, yet some Christians balk at emulating the total humility and focus on the holiness of God, as modeled by the angels and prophets. Therefore I wanted to educate those who read that in reading the Qur'an, even if you are Christian, you can recapture some of the cadence and understanding of how Gabriel, in particular, representative of God and God's angels, speaks. When Gabriel speaks, whether in Arabic, Aramaic or Hebrew, you can think of many of the consonants, vowels, and the letters they are comprised of, and punctuation as being "praise of God" syllables. When people think they are hearing angels, they are not, if the bulk of their speech is about fortune telling, predicting the future, and exhorting people to prayer. Those are false signs derived either from one's own unconscious projections, or from unclean spirits. People and unclean spirits are too proud to speak in the pure speech of Godly praise, as they resist serving God with both words and deed. True angels speak only in a language that are syllables of praise of God.