What guests have arrived today inside you, knocking on the door, saying: Will you please let me in?
Maybe it’s hopelessness or loneliness or worry or restlessness or grief or physical pain or just an old familiar pang of rawness that has no name. See them there, standing outside, all lined up around the corner, travel-weary and disheveled.
Can you let them in? Can you say “yes” to them? Are you willing to feel them, to welcome them into your heart, to allow the pain inside?
Take a lesson from Avraham who sat, open and receptive, patuah, at the opening (petah) of his tent, looking out for such wayfarers and welcoming them with wide open arms into his home, honoring them and nurturing them with a lavish feast.
We strive to cultivate a spirit of hospitality like Avraham’s. Can we turn that hospitality inwards as well, towards the guests that show up inside us, understanding that they, too, like Avraham’’s guests, are angels of a sort, divine messengers who have come to bring us guidance from beyond?
I want to take a closer look at the particular guests that came that day to Avraham — the rabbis identify them as the angels Raphael, Michael and Gavriel — and to try to imagine what it was like that day for Avraham, so that we can feel how this posture of welcoming might work for us.
Guest #1: Raphael (Angel of Healing)
At the start of the story, we find Avraham sitting at the entrance of his tent soon after his circumcision. The rabbis say it was the third day, the height of physical pain. No painkillers. Just the raw unmediated experience of intense pain.
And Avraham is sitting outside in a posture of openness and receptivity, allowing in whoever wants to come in. Surely the first visitor who arrived and was welcomed in was the pain itself. Yes, here you are. I accept you. I feel you. I don’t resist you. Part of our experience of pain is usually our own resistance to it, trying to stop it, to hold tight against it. I imagine Avraham sitting and accepting it, as he did whatever God sent his way — travel, famine, war, barrenness — just allowing it as part of God’s world.
What happens when we accept pain, either physical or emotional, when we truly say “yes” to it and let it inside, embracing it and welcoming it as part of our human experience? There is a quality of transformation that happens to pain in those moments. It’s not that it disappears, not at all; we are now fully in it. It’s that, somehow, within the very depth of the pain, in its very fullness, at its core, is its own balm, its own resolution or dissolution or unwinding. The pain itself holds the medicine.
It’s as if the healing is born out of the wounding itself, as if the suffering calls forth into the world a needed love to take care of it. And so, out of Avraham’s angel of pain — and through his openness to feeling it– emerges Raphael, the angel of refuah, divine healing.
Guest #2: Michael (Bearer of Good Tidings)
On that hot midday, when Avrahm sat feeling the pain of circumcision, surely he also had some emotional suffering. When we are physically in pain, everything seems bleak and impossible. Here I am, he must have thought, recovering from circumcision surgery; how will I ever have children now? It hurts even to move a muscle. That’s the visitor that comes next, isn’t it — hopelessness? Doubt? That sense of: life is impossible; it will never happen; I will always feel like this; I will never be able to fulfill my dreams.
This angel, too, Avraham welcomed; whoever shows up is given a feast. Hopelessness, doubt, come on in, join with the angel of pain. You’re all from God. I don’t fight you or resist you, but open to you, to whatever truth you bring. And so this angel, too, dissolves and transforms in the openness of Avraham’s heart, turning from hopelessness into hope, doubt to faith, becoming a harbinger of good tidings, of the coming birth of a baby to Sarah. Contained in each angel of emotion — if entered fully — is its opposite, its healing counterpart.
Guest #3: Gavriel (Angel of Strength)
And finally, the last angel. Sitting in pain and doubt on that hot day, perhaps another gnawing worry came to Avraham, something he didn’t normally pay attention to, but unconsciously had been sensing — that place where his nephew lived, how immoral and corrupt; what would come of it? This is the angel of Uncomfortable Truths or sometimes, the angel of Worldly Despair, that sense we get, when we are already sunk low from physical and emotional pain, that actually the whole world is evil and going to pot. All those disturbing articles we read come back to us at that moment and we sink into despair, not for ourselves so much, but for the continuance of society.
I see Avraham welcoming this angel, too, willing, at that moment, to sit in the heat of the sun, in the clarity of seeing the truth about the immorality around him, to enter fully into that sinking hole of a world gone awry.
How does this angel shift under the influence of this welcoming posture, of opening to the feeling of despair over the world’s future? This time the resolution is not toward hope and happy endings — sometimes evil is the reality — no, this time, what comes from such opening is the strength to confront it. What needs to shift here is not the world and its state, but Avraham’s own capacity to be in it. (Isn’t that often true for us, that what we need is not for the world to be different, but for us to have the strength to live and engage in it?)
And so this angel of worry over Sodom is, underneath the worry, Gavriel, the angel of gevurah, strength. Normally, we interpret Gavriel’s strength as referring to God’s destruction of Sodom, but perhaps the important strength here is the one bestowed on Avraham; yes, the world is evil and destruction happens, but you will have the courage to do battle with the Holy One over it, as Avraham does so powerfully in the very next section. Opening fully to the pain of the world’s self-destructive tendencies brought forth in Avraham the angel of strength to confront it.
Which angels have come to your doorway today? This is not our intuitive practice, to open and welcome whoever comes. We pick and choose — joy, yes; pain, no; we resist the angels of suffering and send them back out to wander. But what if we tried, for even a second, to adopt the welcoming posture of Avraham, to look despair or anxiety or hurt in the eye and say — come on in; come sit down for a fresh calf and some cakes — I am willing to see you and feel you now? What if we trusted that Rafael, the healing angel, is always lurking near the angel of pain if only we allow the pain in? It is all from God; there is blessing here, in all our guests.
