A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

After reading A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I felt very uplifted and almost childlike. Reading about “angels” made me think of many different movies or shows I used to watch when I was little that had to do with belief in angels. Having those thoughts again was refreshing and almost fun. In the beginning of the story Marquez begins talking about this old man that had fallen in the mud and couldn’t get up. It made me think of the symbolism of fallen angels. But not wanting to regard the poem as blasphemous I decided to set my religious beliefs aside, and just continued to read the poem.

One of my favorite lines of the story is located on pg. 96 when Pelayo runs to get their neighbor who “knew everything about life and death.”

It says “’He’s an angel,’ she told them. ‘He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.’” 

 This line warmed my heart when I read it. The way the woman was able to look at the man lying on the ground and know without a doubt that he was an angel and what had happened. The woman could tell he was an angel as if it was completely normal. When I read this a million thoughts crossed through my mind. Knowing that the child was sick made me realize why the angel would be coming for the child and this made my heart hurt in a bittersweet way. However it was hard for me to see past the woman’s childlike belief in an angel showing up in their front yard as if nothing was out of place at all. This is the childlike faith I believe God calls us to have. And when we have it we may be able to have encounters like this and not think anything of it. I believe this is the mistake many Christians make in this day and age. We are so astounded by these events that occurred on a regular basis in the bible but we fail to realize that this really happened. Those angels really do come and give humans messages, or at least they have and they can. It may have not happened in a while but we don’t have that childlike faith to know when something astounding is God. We tend to believe its coincidence. We even write extremely spiritual people off as radicals. Why can’t we stop and believe in the things that children believe in.