Angels on Earth: Inspiring Real-Life Stories of Fate, Friendship, and the Power of Kindness

I had just finished reading Eugenides' Fresh Complaint, a collection of stories reflecting various train wrecks that constitute personal life in the 21st Century, and thought I needed something more positive so I picked up Angels on Earth which promised to focus on actual stories of human kindness. The Author had published a best-seller (An Invisible Thread) based n her relationship with Maurice, a young boy she befriended when she was a single career executive and her was asking on the street for something to eat. She walked away at first, then returned and took him for a McDonald's dinner, learned about him and began doing this on a regular basis for years thereafter, developing a friendship that rewarded them both. The volume I read is a sequel composed of stories gleaned from others who shared their own examples of kindness richly rewarded. Each is related to the author's own “Maurice story” with its golden thread idea that we are all somehow connected. Make no mistake about it, there is a Hallmark Movie aspect to this collection, a feel-good aspect; but the criticisms commonly applied to these works of fiction also apply to the present work- Angels on Earth does not only accentuate the positive, it exaggerates it beyond credibility, and that is a shame because so many of the core ideas and values extolled are so true, and so needed in our culture.

I suppose the core problem is the tendency to universalize the particular. The Author's own account of responding to the beggar's need is the first example. She gave not just money to a starving child, but time and cultivated a relationship, and this in turn satisfied a deep need in herself. With how many can one do this? By her own account, she had the freedom from other relationships, the available money, etc., to develop this relationship, and then there is what in romantic relationships is called “chemistry.” What works in one particular reciprocal relationship cannot be universalized with all.

This grows out of a myopia of subjectivity. My friend may cheat on his wife and embezzle at work, but he buys me a beer when we meet, so I think he is a great guy. Those other parts of his life are not part of our relationship. Many of the tales of kindness shared in Angels on Earth are of this kind, overlooking, ignoring, denying moral failure in other parts of the lives of those receiving kindness, and sometimes even in the lives of those who give it. Several of the subjects divorced in the course of their relationship with their “angel,” an obvious contradiction (or at least wrinkle) to the invisible thread said to bind us to others.

Since the Author's kindness has been rewarded in this relationship, she universalizes it and collects and shares the singular stories of others. These are stories of kindness without ultimate sacrifice, because people are seen as basically good and ready to return kindness. The natural kindness of children is extolled, without acknowledging the cruelty children can be capable of; there are no exploiters among these stories, no dysfunctional relationships, because all the objects of kindness never bite the hand that feeds them, the unbearable burden of gratitude (so difficult for children to acknowledge until long after they are freed from it) is never acknowledged.

There are class aspects to these stories which bear examination. Often the object of kindness is in a lower social-economic class, subject either to bureaucratic regulation (family services), or to neglect (mother is a drug dealer, etc.). The person with her act together (at least three quarters of the stories are about women showing kindness) helps the subject whose response “wins the heart” of the giver, who then feels amply rewarded, especially as the relationship develops. Usually the woman becomes a mother-figure often called a “grandmother,” or godmother, who takes an on-going interest in her friend. Those who make it into the educated middle class, or at least aspire to, are characterized as the great successes of the relationship. As a well-educated middle class individual, I applaud their achievement, but I recognize these as means to other ends and not as synonymous with success, security, and respectability.

To read this book is to enter the world of the feminine, characterized by feeling for others. It recalls the story of a husband and wife who had watched a tear-jerking documentary about mistreated children in another country and after midnight the wife asked her husband how he could sleep knowing that children were suffering. “I try not to let it bother me so that the people I love can sleep,” he replied. The interest, nay, enthusiasm with which individuals pursue their godchildren, or projects to do good in their name/memory, seems to overshadow other threads and relationships in their lives. Clearly the Author presents them as the most significant or fulfilling- but this may be part of the exaggeration I mentioned earlier.

In this volume, relationships are chief reward for kindness, and this is celebrated throughout, even extended to animals and the dead. A charity undertaken by parents of a child who died due mistakes in a testing procedure generates interest and success 7 years before its expected time, and this is attributed to the deceased child's relationship with all the contributors, patients, and staff. His story or narrative may have affected many and motivated his parents (whose status as international professionals gave them skills and connections to see the project through), but child who died and the cause his name is connected with are very different entities.

The most dangerous aspect of this collection is its conviction that rules get in the way of kindness. Many of the rules are merely social conventions, expectations, customs rather than rules, but this fuzziness in thinking about the rules which set (or ought to set) our expectations is part of the danger. It is coupled with statements that can only be characterized as ignorance- “Why don't we teach kindness in school like we teach math?” - as if kindness weren't part of every teacher's exhortations from day one. Furthermore, seductive relationships may form which are at the expense of others. A lonely woman finds love with the neighbor's husband, a theme in many a romance novel going back to at least Jane Eyre, only in these stories the supplanted love is not an unworthy wife but an unworthy mother. Rules, particularly moral rules. Tell us whether our relationships and subjective feelings they generate are praiseworthy or merely self-indulgent.

Although the Author is of Catholic background (she may even be a practicing Catholic), there is little explicit Christianity in the book. The concept of angels as messengers of God gets massaged into the idea of those who do good to others, that is, love others, and we are all angels, even that guy who cuts in line in the checkout lane. Since sin plays such a negligible role in these stories, there is little place for forgiveness of sin, or even of others. Fate or destiny, stand-ins for the non-personal God, is the preferred concept, in many ways preserving a transcendent sense of the divine which is frankly lost in the imminence of felt love that is expressed vividly in all these stories. A Chinese concept of invisible thread is utilized to express the sense of human connectedness, “exposed,” as it were, in the relationships that develop out of acts of kindness. Many discover causes, loves, greater than themselves, a love that transcends one's own life. I believe this relates to our human need for power/attention. We can affect people by doing things that make them happy, and failing that, by doing things that make them angry. We fall into the latter when we fail at the former, and how our environment responds, beginning with how our parents did in our infancy shapes our habits and personality. Certainly, blessing people is closer to the Divine (God gives blessing to those who hate Him as well as to those who love Him), but scarcity tends to make that more difficult, a circumstance that relates to social class. Perhaps the book reflects more of American Catholicism of the last generation than at first meets the eye, for there is the concern with the here and now (“practical religion”), emphasis on the goodness of humanity, flawed but not dead in nature, and therefore no need for particular articulation of faith in Christ because God loves everybody and respects all religions, and just wants people to be good and prosper, temporally speaking. And that is the salvation offered in each story of angel's work recounted in this volume.

To sum up- these book is about a good thing, kindness, exaggerated into falsehood: kindness exaggerated into subjectivity, seeing the world through rose-colored glasses of personal relationship; kindness exaggerated into superstition, preoccupied with signs that a relationship with the deceased or with an angel spirit continues; kindness exaggerated into sentimentalism where what is felt is more real than whatever else may be in the picture.

I listened to the reading of Gabra Zackman whose tone and inflection reminded me of Jane Lynch who has played a number of villainous or at least ironic, false. or self-deceived roles, not a good association for this material.

If you enjoyed An Invisible Thread, you love this one too. The world really is full of wonderful people!

Awesome