The Magic Trick

It was one of the angels’ birthdays. He was turning five, an age when everything seems incredible. God said to him, “Do you want to see a magic trick?” The angel eagerly replied that he did. God said, “Look.” The angel looked and saw that a world existed, but the sight was not as pleasing to him as it was when God pulled animals out of his hat. The magic trick was too intricate for the angel to appreciate. The angel told God that creating a world wasn’t magic; it was creating in a world that was the difficult part, making something out of something, not making something out of nothing. So God banished the angel to the world that he had created in order that the angel might come to recognize the awesomeness of his power. Instead, however, the angel found the real magic to come in manipulating God’s power. He had no cares for the creation of fruit trees, but God knows he loved to pluck from them. The angel sought to show that more divinity lies in rearranging things than in forming them. Although God banished the angel, he found truth in the claim of the devil’s advocate, and so he said to himself, “I will withdraw now, that way the world will be left to morph into magical things.” And so God put the world in one of his filing cabinets, where he stored all of his magic-tricks-in-progress, tagging a reminder note on the front telling himself to open it and check on the world in a certain amount of days. (Different versions of the story give different lengths of time. This storyteller believes that God wrote “Tomorrow,” and that every time he saw the note he understood it to mean the next day).

By now the angel is an old man, breathing out the last of his breaths. But he is not sad to go, for death is his magic trick. God said, “Now you see me,” but the angel says, “Now you don’t,” and vanishes.

The last part of the magic trick, the reappearance, or as some call it, the prestige, is of course, God’s rebuttal to the angel. And every now and then God is allowed such victories, as when he opened the filing cabinet that was housing his world and brought down plagues and commanded the Sea of Reads to part, and brought down manna and commanded the Hebrews to part with their gods. Who knows what will happen when he opens the filing cabinet again? Some say that the last time God opened it, he forgot to close it all the way, and so while we can’t see much of God’s office, we can hear him practicing for his next big trick. “What precisely can we hear,” you ask? A long blast of a ram’s horn, it sounds like from over here. Perhaps the sound’s vibrations will shake the cabinets, spilling forth our world. Perhaps that is the trick. We are not the spectators of the magic trick, after all. We are the trick itself. But the real trick, if you ask me, is that we are both. And for that, we have both God and the angel to thank.