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Thursday, June 25, 2020
The truth about angels
Messengers of comfort
and courage:
The truth about angels
How people of faith have
found meaning in angels
Around the turn of the
millenium, British scholar Emma Heathcote-James set out to collect stories of
modern day angel encounters. She placed a classified ad seeking personal accounts
of angelic contact and was startled at the number of people who eagerly came
forward to share their experiences. The reports rolled in from across a wide
swath of cultural and religious identities, including many who claimed little
interest in spiritual matters. Heathcote-James ultimately archived and analyzed
more than 800 such stories for her book Seeing Angels: True ContemporaryAccounts of Hundreds of Angelic Experiences (John Blake Publishing Ltd.).
One of the stories that
was submitted by a woman who notes that she is not at all religious begins:
“About ten years ago I was
sitting quietly. I was not ill. I had nothing in particular to worry me. I was
not asleep. What I saw and felt was nothing like a dream. I felt that I was
looking into a cave made of sheets of blue light. I felt as if I was moving
towards the cave. Then I realized it was not a cave but a winged being.”
The event’s narrator says
that she unexpectedly found herself enveloped within the wings of an angelic
being. Additionally, she sensed a non-verbal message emanating strongly from
the presence. Its meaning, she says, could best be conveyed in a quote she
later read on a prayer card: “All is well, all is well and all manner of things
are well.”
That famous text from
Julian of Norwich makes for a natural extension of “Do not be afraid!”—the
greeting that angels offer when they appear in the New Testament. We ourselves
live in fearful times, where perceived threats are amplified by a breathless
24-hour news cycle. It’s no wonder then, that angels have become a pervasive
fixture of our popular culture—a celestial balm for our earthly anxieties—with
angel channeling workshops and angel energy healings sidling up surprisingly
close to the mainstream.
The word angel derives
from the Greek angelos, which, like its Hebrew equivalent, mal’akh, means
messenger. In these days of fretful disquiet—while society seems to change
faster than we can adapt to its rearrangements—many are hungry for a message
from above, for some clear sign of the meaning of it all.
Regarding angels, the
teaching of the Catholic Church is unequivocal. “The existence of the
spiritual, non-corporeal beings that Sacred Scripture usually calls ‘angels’ is
a truth of faith,” professes the Catechism of the Catholic Church. A few lines
further on we read, “From its beginning until death, human life is surrounded
by their watchful care and intercession. Beside each believer stands an angel
as protector and shepherd leading him to life.” Not only do angels exist, says
the church, they dwell among us as constant companions.
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