Hmm

“Angels can fly,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “because they take themselves lightly,” and that’s the credo of Stephen Mitchell’s “Meetings With the Archangel,” a beguiling spiritual memoir that masquerades as a comic novel. Mitchell is an accomplished and distinguished interpreter of sacred texts, and his translations and readings have earned him a following among the earnest seekers whose favorite books are found on the “Religion and Spirituality” shelf. Those who already know Mitchell’s work will be neither surprised nor put off by the central conceit of his latest book--the narrator is visited by the angel Gabriel, a worldly wise mentor with a sharply ironic sense of humor--but the more jaded reader may be shocked at the riches to be found here.

“Meetings With the Archangel” is spirituality with an attitude, a wry, knowing and playful entertainment with a theological subtext. “Angels have sex?” is the narrator’s first question to Gabriel. “How do you think the Giants will do this year?” is Gabriel’s first question to his earthly protege, whose name is Stephen.

After the first encounter with Gabriel, Stephen recalls the first halting steps of his own spiritual journey, starting out in Brooklyn in the ‘60s (“The first time I ever smoked broccoli was with an ultra-Orthodox friend of mine who looked as if he had stepped right out of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ ”) and wandering through the byways of a spiritual pilgrimage that lasts a lifetime. From the Book of Job to the Bhagavad Gita, from Kabbalah to the I Ching, from the Berditchever Rebbe to a Zen master named Sumi-Sahn, from Aquinas to Blake to Jung, Stephen has been there, done that.

His spiritual insights, always revealed with urgency, intimacy and candor, are sometimes startling. Struggling to make sense of the Holocaust, Stephen tries to see the world through Hitler’s eyes. A self-imposed spiritual retreat becomes an ordeal, “like cleaning the heart with a piece of steel wool.” He dares to describe the most ineffable of experiences, including a memorable field trip to heaven, where he encounters Michelangelo, Milton and Isaiah over drinks at a celestial sidewalk cafe.

So the real concerns of “Meetings With the Archangel” are profoundly moral and mystical, even if they are concealed within the burlesque of one man’s life and the banter of angels and mortals. But Mitchell never takes himself or his book too seriously. “Before there was One, there was Zero,” explains Gabriel, “and inside that circle dwells the mind of God.” To which Stephen replies: “Hmm.”