A Year in the World Read Free Page A

window!”
    I start to ask sarcastically if he is a good dancer and what kind of dances he leads her in—rhumba? But I don’t. As a doubter with strong spiritual interests, I’m tantalized by her big holy spirit visitations. I imagine it feels like a mewling kitten being lifted in the jaws of an enormous mother cat and taken to safety. I’m ready myself but have never felt the slightest inkling that anything out there in the void is the least bit interested in the hairs on my head or the feathers of small sparrows. “If God is talking about me, I’d like to hear what he says because I’ve never heard from him before tonight.” Where’s the flight attendant? I’d like a big glass of wine. This is getting surreal. I’m thirty-five thousand feet above terra firma with someone who dances with God.
    “Well, I will tell you that He says you have the gift of divine humility. How did you get that? It’s so rare.”
    “Maybe it’s a lack of confidence!”
    “No, I’ve seen it in one priest, someone I consulted when I felt the urge to prophesy.”
    Whoa! Prophesy? “Oh, you’re a prophet?” I toss this off casually, as though it were
Oh, you’re from Memphis.
    She looks out the window. Sighs. “I know how it sounds. It’s so
simple
.” I see her struggling to explain. “I just wait to speak. I wait for God. Sometimes it’s just sounds.”
    “Glossolalia?” She nods. “I’ve seen that. My friends and I used to peer in the windows at the holy roller and snake-handling churches way down in South Georgia.” I don’t say that those people fell to the floor writhing and drooling. That we ran away, scared out of our socks. This woman in her Dana Buchman suit and good haircut seems as sane as the United pilot of this plane.
    “Have you ever heard of a Charismatic Prophet? That’s my calling. I knew I was going to sit beside someone on this flight who would change my life. I always wanted to write. Now I hear how
you
do it and it frees me to try. God put me beside you. Someone, he says, with a holy approach to writing.”
    Now I’m really fascinated. Someone who not only hears the voice of God but speaks in the tongues of angels and knows what’s coming toward us. And I like hearing God’s perception that my approach to writing is holy. No one ever has talked to me about the nature of my involvement with words. I’ve heard plenty about the words themselves but not about the vocation I have. Turbulence starts to shake the overhead compartments. A queasy flyer, I begin to wonder if maybe she is an angel sent to accompany me to the afterlife when the plane spirals down into the Atlantic. But soon the seat belt light flicks off, and the long flight across the waters, black, then leaden, then streaked with sterling light, continues.
    As we start our descent into the rainy skies of Paris, she says, “I don’t do this. I don’t like to debase my gift, but I will tell you something. You are travelling with three angels. One is ministering, one is protecting, and I don’t know what the other one is for.”
    “Oh, no,” I say, instantly pessimistic. “Angel of death.”
    She laughs. “God tells me you are too fatalistic. The third angel is something very good.”
    Maybe it’s the skipping across time zones or the cabin pressure or the lack of sleep, but I willingly close my eyes and try to sense the presence of three angels. Privately, I’m shaken because when I first went to Italy and bought my house, I had a dream that the house held one hundred angels and that I would discover them one by one. Metaphorically, that came true. Starting my travels, I have been given by a stranger three angels to go with me. Without a shred of belief, I can’t deny that I am touched.
    I give her a list of books I’ve mentioned and a card with my first name printed on it. I start to write my address but decide that if she wants to reach me, God will direct her.
     
    Madrid. All the connections worked. I find Ed waiting in