Sunday Pages: "Calling All Angels"

A song by Jane Siberry

Dear Reader,

We can see the dark forces gathering, like in a superhero movie. In Florida, the FPOTUS broke bread with an unapologetic anti-Semite and a Holocaust-denying fascist. In Washington, the pusillanimous incoming House Speaker allows the fascist wing of the GOP to hold sway. In Colorado, a stochastic terrorist murdered five innocent people and injured many more at what used to be a safe space for the LGBTQ community. In Ukraine, there is atrocity upon atrocity, seemingly without end.

On social media, the soulless new owner promises to, in the cynical name of free speech, re-platform the lowest dregs of humanity. As I wrote back in May:

There is already enough disinformation on Twitter. If Mr. Free Speech has his way, the worst of the worst—chaos agents who have been eighty-sixed from the platform—will make their angry return. It will be like in Superman II when the nuclear explosion releases General Zod and friends from their two-dimensional prison. All hell will break loose. And Musk will titter like Lex Luthor with hairplugs.

So: yeah. Dark forces gathering.

In 1861, with the nation on the cusp of civil war, Abraham Lincoln closed his First Inaugural Address with an appeal to our common goodness:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Alas, the slaveholding states broke the bonds of affection Lincoln spoke of. The better angels did not prevail—not until over 600,000 Americans were dead. Instead, the dark angels triumphed: the forces of evil. And so I wonder: Where are the better angels of Donald Trump’s nature? (Taking in the World Cup in Qatar, is what the New York Times would say.) What about Kanye West’s? Did they die with Donda? Does Nick Fuentes have better angels in his nature? Does Marjorie Taylor Greene? What about Anderson Lee Aldrich? The better angels of Elon Musk’s nature, meanwhile, seem to have perished in an emerald mine accident in apartheid-era South Africa.

I realize it’s fashionable to bash the belief in angels—literal angels, I mean, cherubs with feathered wings and all that. But if we believe in a higher power, whether we call it God or Allah or Ahura Mazda or just “the Universe” because we’re “not religious,” it stands to reason that we should also expect, on occasion, to see manifestations of that higher power. I sold my Tesla shares in the spring. My wife got covid last month; I did not. In fantasy football, I picked up Justin Fields just as he started racking up 40-point weeks. Chance? Luck? Or the better angels—the ancestors, the spirits, the powers that be, the Lord God Almighty Himself—looking out for me?

Around this time eighteen years ago, at the suggestion of our doula, I burned a mix CD to play in the birthing center. My wife was due on December 11th, and I wanted to be ready. (Our son was two full weeks late, as it turned out, so I still had plenty of time; I’ll let you add 14 to 11 and figure out which day, of all days, that little stinker came into the world.) One of the songs on that mix was the transcendently beautiful “Calling All Angels,” by Jane Siberry. On the track, she harmonizes with k.d. lang, who has one of the best voices of all time ever—like, if angels could sing, they would sound like k.d. lang. And if those same angels were going to heed anyone’s entreaties, I can think of no better petitioner than Siberry.

This is a song about grief, about making it through hard times, about life’s beauty trumping its ugliness and sorrow, and about the power of divine aid. It opens with an incantation, a summoning. She’s literally calling all the angels—saints, in her formulation: Santa Maria, Santa Teresa, Santa Anna, Santa Susannah, Santa Cecilia, Santa Copelia, Santa Dominica, and so on. I’ll pick it up from the second verse:

And every day you gaze upon the sunset
With such love and intensity—
Why it’s almost as if,
If you could only crack the code,
You’d finally understand what this all means.

Ah, but if you could,
Do you think you would
Trade it all—
All the pain and suffering?
Ah, but then you would have missed
The beauty of the light upon the earth,
And the sweetness of the leaving.

Calling all angels, calling all angels.
Walk me through this one.
Don’t leave me alone.
Calling all angels, calling all angels.
We’re trying, we’re hoping,
But we’re not sure how.

Calling all angels, calling all angels.
Walk me through this one.
Don’t leave me alone.
Calling all angels, calling all angels.
We’re trying,
We’re hoping,
We’re loving,
And we’re hurting.
We’re crying,
We’re calling,
Cuz we’re not sure how this goes.

To me, the most powerful part of the song are those five words right in the middle: “the sweetness of the leaving.” Even as she suffers through her loss, even as she cries and calls for heavenly help, Siberry recognizes that there is sublimity even in the ending of life—a piece of wisdom that has escaped the soulless billionaires of the world who yearn for corporeal immortality.

I don’t know if angels are real. Maybe they are just creations of our own collective imagination, going back through the centuries. Maybe they only exist inside ourselves, as Lincoln suggests. Maybe there are no angels in America. But if they do exist, if they are real, now’s the time for the better ones to see us through.

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Photo credit: Cropped image by R Neil Marshman. Stone angel on a grave at St Mary Magdalene parish church, Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire.

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