Annual angel hark reuinion

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/121817.cfm
JER 23:5-8
MT 1:18-25

Several of the original angels present at the birth of Jesus get together each year in Bethlehem. It’s a celestial memorial. Every year they join up and play cards. Not playing cards like you think. These are registered angelic voice cards. They’re more like baseball cards, but each angel only has one, and they are only used by angels to orchestrate an angelic choir. They’re not really baseball cards, but they look like them. At special occasions the cards are laid out like keys on a keyboard, and then played, creating unique arrangements.

There’s a lot of missing backstory here. Let me fill in some blanks.

Angelic voices have left important historical markers in human history, but none more than at Jesus’ birth. This only happens when God allows the physics of angels and humans to intersect. There are a whole lot more rules of physics for angels than humans. Angel voices exist in a different dimension than ours. Their voices, in fact, have a specific dimension. So it’s a big deal when we can hear them.

We humans interact in seven dimensions, four which are most familiar — height, width, depth, and breadth. Breadth is time. The other three dimensions are micro, macro, and “in toto.” In toto means “overall.” We most easily experience the four familiar dimensions, but with tools and calculations we can delve deeply into micro and reach far and wide into macro. Only with God’s help can we transcend into in toto. None of our dimensions, though, deals with our ability to sing as a heavenly choir. Angels are unique in this area.

Scientists vary on their enumeration of the actual total possible dimensions of humanity. For now (and to skip over difficult to understand metaphysics) micro, macro and in toto capture all possible extra dimensions for humans into three handy buckets. Micro (peering into the world of atoms) and Macro (gazing into the galaxies) mostly concern peering and gazing. We're not actually being in there or floating around out there, though technically that’s exactly where we are. Like I said, let’s skip that part. In toto, however, includes that dimensional plane where we are meant to be, where creation initially put us. Due to the veil of death, and a steely gate concealing us from Paradise, we only enter “in toto” when God wants us to.

It just so happens that when we, in our current sinful state, are in “in toto” we are perilously close to death, exiting this life, as it were. Just to be clear, you cannot reach in toto with LSD or some other drug. Those are just hallucinations. You also cannot reach in toto by centering prayer, transcendental meditation, or holding your breath. Those are just ways of going deaf and blind and insensitive to touch, which leaves you grazing at the dry wasteland desert of your mind. It’s like putting sand in your mouth compared to in toto. 

In toto means to have your being connected to God. You can’t do it. God must reach into you, and because doing so might stop your heart cold, or burn your eyes out, God usually waits until you are a scoshe away from death to do it. Or, he sends an angel. Like to Mary and to Joseph. God actually appeared to Paul and he went blind. So, Angels are preferable for in toto conversations.

Jesus Christ, of course, as God, exists in all possible and impossible dimensions at once. Eventually, God will call us to him and we will experience all dimensions, which is the definition of being brothers and sisters to Jesus. At first, though, we’ll probably experience the same dimensions as the angels. Mostly because we have no idea what the divine dimensions are really like.

Angels have three more dimensions than we do — transit, transform, and gloria — which are easiest for us to understand as movement, appearance, and voice. Those wouldn’t technically be dimensions in our existence, but these angel dimensions behave that way to us, when we periodically get to see them. In their heavenly existence angels look like, well ... we’re not really sure. 

Anywho, the two or three hundred angels that were present at Jesus’ birth enjoy an annual reunion to replay their angelic Alleluia song. Voices like nuns in holy reverie. The true number of angels varies according to who remembers actually being there. Even the angels can’t be sure, so it’s become frustrating for them to recreate the original Alleluia song. Angels don’t lie, mind you, except for the bad batch which have severe limitations on their entire dimensional capabilities, and have had for the past two thousand years when Jesus rose from the dead. All angels do, however, forget. You can imagine the difficulty of where you were when you were younger on a specific day and time. Consider the many millennium of an angel’s existence and holy cow. It’s a horrific task, especially when so many angels discuss the day of Jesus’ birth, and pretty soon they’re hard put to remember if they just heard about that day or if they were there, standing around and singing their lungs out.

So, the estimation of the number of actual angels at Jesus’ birth was done by Principalities of the third sphere of angels. For these nit-pickyy angels it’s important to know such things. The tedious tasks always get assigned to the Principalities. The calculations they use are accomplished through the use of the angel cards, which takes us back to the beginning of this story, and will then help us to understand how the number is hard to identify, and is still off by a hundred or so angels.

You see, each angel’s vocal cards were made up for them right after the fall of Lucifer. Out of some six trillion angels created by God, some number of heavenly eons ago (outside of our time and space), over two trillion of them fell with Satan in a treasonous anarchy that left heaven weeping. Yes, there are six trillion angels. The loss of so many angelic buddies literally tore a hole in the hearts of the angels who remained faithful to God. 

Each angel vocal resonance reverberates differently, and make up as many variations of lilts and oohs and aahs as there are angels. God created six trillion unique angel voices. A symphonic choir's music sheet must be a mile high. Whew. 

So, not only was there a hole in the hearts of the angels because of their fallen friends, but with two trillion missing voices the huge vocal hole in the angelic glory and praise to the Father must've been jarring. The choir didn’t sound the same. As angels are understood to be already created as a set number, God didn’t consider making a new series of angels to replace the fallen ones. Instead, he duplicated, and in some cases tripled, the actual voice capabilities, the vocal dimensional genes, into the angels left to him until the entire angelic choir was complete again. Many angels no longer have just one voice, but two or even three. The angelic choir was restored. We call the instrument in our voice box the vocal chord, but to the angels the vocal chord means something completely different.

The angels that were left to God do not have competitive genes, nor jealousy, nor pride, nor anger. Not any more. As a gift to his faithful angels, God removed those dark genetics from the good angels and sent them off to fill the vocal genetic holes of the lost angels. The devil's choir, ultimately, has no voice, but they have double darkness. That’s why devils are so danged awful. The proliferated vocal range of the good angels should have restored their choral fullness, but because of the angst and sadness among the faithful angels a laconic sense of loss still overcomes the choir of the heaven. 

The Principalities believed that an accounting, a published registration system of angelic duties and assignments (and therefore vocal ranges) would restore angelic confidence. Misunderstanding that grief responds poorly to calculus, the Principalities nonetheless successfully masked legalism for hope. Now, God could have removed obsessive and compulsive legalistic genetic affects from angels at that very moment, and sent that also into the devils. The laconic sadness might have abated, even permanently, but God finds the parenthetic mopyness and obsessive compulsive nature of his angels adorable. He loves that about his angels. Therefore, God let the Principalities perform their inane claims to subject pain with perfunctory machinations, and so the mark of angelic voices in the heavenly choir took place, accounting for every angelic particularity, including voice(s). Thus were born the angel cards, which enumerate and authenticate each angel’s portion, proprietary vocal chords if you will, of holy song. The Principalities were satisfied, and when that happens the angels sighed with relief.

When the group of some ready and handy angels were drawn together by the Holy Spirit to sing praises to Jesus at his birth, and actually intersect vocally into the human dimension, their cards were on hand. Unfortunately, recreating the dealt cards with precision evades even angelic capabilities. Angels don’t sign up for such events, nor does an angel get audibly picked. The other two dimensions of angels, movement and appearance if you remember, are rather wispy dimensions. During any cosmic gathering of the Holy Spirit, angels just materialize when they are needed. The Seraphim and Virtues and Archangels are all part of any gathered angelic choir. Every kind of angel gets into a choir, which inhibits categoric memory. If the IT shop of a company, for instance, were to form a choir it's quite easy to remember who was in the choir. All ranks of angels are involved in a plethora of duties somewhere within creation or in heaven, but like an immense matrix of mingling and matching, angels make their appearance as the Holy Spirit assembles them. In a inaudible convening whoosh, a conglomerate batch of angels appeared at Jesus’ birth. They lit up like organized fireflies in the sky and then sang in holy concert like, well ... heavenly angels.

In much the way as the angels show up, they also return to their next engagement, or return to their previous one. It’s like a very long attention deficit disorder event that pops up, and then goes away, back to where everyone should be next. A mystical flash mob northern light show that sings to the heavens. Pretty dag-nabbed awesome, but impossible to snapshot or check every on which angel flicked in and out.

All those angels who were at Jesus’ birth left a record of their praise song, though, which is a cool side effect of both human and angelic dimensions. Sounds, especially in the heavenly realm, remain permanently stored in the ether. The Principalities can replay the original event. The angels, though, cannot resound that appearance in a living reunion. Any attempt to calibrate that Alleluia according to the same angels originally present with their singular, dual, or triple vocal capabilities (since, remember, some of them got the vocals of one of more lost angels) evades recreation. It’s not that the Principality angels don’t have computers or calibration skills. It’s that the flash mob nature of how angels show up relies completely on the Holy Spirit’s willingness to participate in the obsessive compulsive activity of the Principalities. 

Though God loves this weird way about the angels, he’s mostly like the owner of a cute puppy who enjoys the happy pup chasing their tail. Angelic behavior is adorable to God. The dog owner, for instance, doesn’t reach down and hold the tail in order for the puppy to catch it. After two millennia, the precise angel recount at the birth of Jesus eludes a final musical synch. God’s not getting involved at all in the counting activities, because he's enjoying the escapade. Consequently, getting the sound of several hundred angels figured out against the probabilities of six trillion angels may well go on for another couple thousand years. 

In the meantime, hoards of angels show up every year, well into the hundreds of thousands now — cuz who knows now who was really present way back then — and they place their cards on this enormous stadium sized calliope-like keyboard somewhere on the outskirts of Bethlehem. In a thoroughly invisible dimension to us, they attempt to recreate a sound that awoke hillsides of shepherds, lit up the skies like the Northern Lights, and flicks on and off in the space of time it takes for a child to be born.

By the way, the actual date of Jesus’ birth has been calculated from everything like March 21st, June 17th, and September 30th. Sitings of angels celebrating, unfortunately, doesn't always take place within human dimensions. Only an "in toto" event will reveal the angelic choir reunion. If we could catch a glimpse of the angel's regathering then the exact date of Jesus' birth would be pinpointed. 

Sound experts and acoustical engineers will eventually get wind of the reunion, as revelation unfolds toward the end of this age. For now, the internet barely murmurs about angel sitings. Angels gathering each year is not yet even a rumor. Regardless, just like the Principalities, human investigation along any scientific endeavor rarely finds quick success because God looks at scientific discovery very much like he looks at his angels; which is how we look at puppy dogs chasing their tales.   

So, whatever day you celebrate it, Merry Christmas, Come Emmanuel, and I hope that God opens a hole into in toto and let's you harken to the herald angels' song.