Angels

The Rev. Hugh Hildesley, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City, was in the hospital and under the knife. But in a classic near-death experience, Hildesley felt his soul rise out of his body and “a pulsing, flowing light of incredible brilliance wash over me. Around me was a community of spirits,” he recalls, “and they had a message for me–that there is a spirit community and an afterlife.” Looking back on it, Hildesley says, “I believe I was in the glorious company of angels and archangels.”

Angels are appearing everywhere in America. And not just because it’s Christmas. For more than a year now, books about angels–guardian angels, letters about angels and, above all, personal encounters of an angelic kind–have dominated the religious best-seller list. Those who see angels, talk to them, put others in touch with them are prized guests on television and radio talk shows. Need inspiration? There are workshops that will assist you in identifying early angel experiences or in unleashing your “inner angel.” Tired of your old spirit guide? New Age channelers will connect you with Michael the Archangel. Have trouble recognizing the angels among us? join an angel focus group. Their cultural wingspan now extends even to Broadway. The year’s most celebrated and intelligent play, Tony Kushner’s two-part “Angels in America,” fuses figures out of Biblical and Mormon angelology to give his “gay fantasia on a national theme” a comic transcendental dimension.

Driven by book sales approaching a heavenly 5 million copies, the angel subculture is off on more than a wing and a prayer. Much as angels are said to-collect in choirs, those who track them cluster together. The AngelWatch Network in Mountainside, N.J., monitors angelic comings and goings in its bimonthly journal, which has 1,800 subscribers. Through its headquarters in Golden, Colo., the 1,600 members of the Angel Collectors Club of America exchange information on everything from angel cookie jars and postage stamps to–of course–angel-food recipes. The handsdown champion of angel collectors is Joyce Berg, 62, whose home in Beloit, Wis., is stuffed with 10,455 different artifacts. “They give you a good feeling,” says Berg, who greets tourists in her wings, halo and homemade silver angel dress. For the technoliterate, there are computerized angel conferences. And the devout can join prayer groups like “Philangeli,” which means “Friends of the Angels.”

Where angels walk, fearless merchandisers eagerly tread. That jingle You hear this Christmas is not Santa’s sleigh bells but the sound of cash registers ringing up sales of angel artifacts. In addition to a whole library of angel books, there are angel calendars, diaries, dolls, pins, watches and–at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman-Marcus–a new “Angel” perfume from French clothing designer Thierry Mugler, who believes everyone has a guardian angel, or at least can smell like one. Across America there are more than 30 specialty stores and catalog houses devoted exclusively to angelware. Crystal Connection, an environmentally concerned store in Austin, Texas, sells icons of plant and river angels to encourage reverence for the planet. “Our whole store is angels this year,” says Debbie Tompkins, co-owner of Translations in Dallas, which offers angel napkin rings, plates and thank-you notes. “All angels sell,” Tompkins reports. “I think it’s because there’s a sense of people wanting to feel–I hate to say it–angelic.”

it may be kitsch, but there’s more to the current angel obsession than the Hallmarking of America. Like the search for extraterrestrials, the belief in angels implies that we are not alone in the universe–that someone up there likes me. “It’s a New Age answer to the homelessness of secularity,” says theologian Ted Peters, of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, Calif “Most people think of angels as benign, pleasant and helping,” observes University of Wisconsin psychiatrist Richard Thurrell. “And it’s nice to have comfort in a cruel world.”

Much of the new angelology is lifted from Roman Catholic sources–though without much regard for church tradition. “Angels represent God’s personal care for each one of us,” says Father Andrew Greeley, the sociologist-novelist. But all too often these days, it is the angels–not the Lord–who get all the credit. To some extent the church itself is to blame. Although the invocation of angels continues in some churches–especially in the vibrant Orthodox liturgies, where the faithful join the heavenly host in singing the Lord’s praises–their existence is rarely remarked. Children’s prayers to their guardian angels, like other popular Catholic devotions, have declined since Vatican Council II. Among many otherwise upright believers, angels have become optional accessories, articles of hope but not quite faith. “When I die,” says Lawrence S. Cunningham, chairman of the University of Notre Dame’s theology department, “I’ll be very disappointed if I don’t meet any angels.”

The last time they were asked, 50 percent of adult Americans told the Gallup poll that they believe that angels exist. That was in 1988, two years before the appearance of Sophy Burnham’s “A Book of Angels,” the volume that sent America searching for the halo effect. A mixture of her own experiences of angels, reports from others and a potpourri of angel lore, Burnham’s book is now in its 30th printing, with 566,000 copies to date. A sequel, ‘Angel Letters," has 200,000 copies in print. Other authors build on her formula: Joan Wester Anderson’s “Where Angels Walk” (400,000 copies); “Ask Your Angels,” by Alma Daniel, Timothy Wyllie and Andrew Ramer (270,000 copies); Eileen Elias Freeman’s “Touched by Angels” (65,000), and four New Agey angel volumes by Terry Lynn Taylor that have a total of 320,000 copies in print. And that’s only the top of the list. Sparked by the renewed interest in angels, publishers have reissued two old reliables: philosopher Mortimer Adler’s 1982 scholastic analysis, “Angels and Us,” and a revised edition of Billy Graham’s greatest hit, “Angels: God’s Secret Agents,” which has sold 2.6 million copies since 1975.

“Nineteen ninety-three was clearly the year of the angels,” observes Phyllis Tickle, religious-books editor for Publishers Weekly. “Like ecology, angels allow us a safe place to talk to each other about spiritual things. They provide a socially acceptable way to talk about God without stating a theological commitment.” For Eileen Elias Freeman, who presides over the Angel-Watch Network, much of the angels’ attraction is precisely their lack of denominational commitments. “Angels transcend every religion, every philosophy, every creed,” she writes. “in fact, angels have no religion as we know it–their existence precedes every religious system that has ever existed on earth.”

If these books are to be believed, Americans never met an angel they didn’t like. Threaded through the texts are tales about lastminute rescues by luminous spirits, human-looking benefactors who disappear after doing good deeds or disembodied helping hands–Allstate angels–who tug people back from imminent disaster. They are, in short, visions and happy coincidences turned into modern miracle stories whose protagonists the authors–most of them women–have come to recognize as angels.

“My book gave people permission to say, ‘Yes, this happened to me, too,” says Burnham, a novelist in Washington, D.C., who encountered her first angel as a young housewife. For Freeman–whose life, she says, was saved by an angel who kept her from being stabbed while she was in college–writing about her experiences has been a heavenly catharsis. Over the past dozen years, Freeman has learned much about what God’s messengers are up to from her personal guardian angel, Ennis, and his heavenmates Kennisha, Asendar and Tallithia. About 250 years ago, they have informed her, guardian angels initiated what she calls “The Pilot Program” to increase cooperation with the faithful and ultimately “transform the world.” Clearly they have a way to go.

Not surprisingly, a lot of readers now want in on the action. If the first wave of books brought angels–and their believers–out of the culture closet, the second wave is even more ambitious. With subtitles like ‘A handbook for aspiring angels" and “The angels’ guide to personal growth,” they signal a move from telling stories to making contact. In a typical workshop, like one conducted for 100 aspirants at the Episcopal National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, Burnham uses the conventional techniques of “guided meditation” to silence the mind and unlock the imagination. Once they’d settled into their personal “sacred spaces,” her initiates–a third of whom had already experienced angels–were invited to listen for messages. Praying to God is necessary, Burnham explained, “but the answer often comes through an angel.” When participants asked how they could distinguish between an angel’s message and their own imaginations, Burnham cited Joan of Arc, who heard voices, too: “That’s one way God speaks to me, through my imagination.”

Angels have long played pivotal roles in the religious imagination. They are mysterious, outsize figures woven into the sacred Scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam–and into much of Western literature besides (page 57). Dante’s luminous Paradiso, for instance, is constructed in ascending circles based on Catholicism’s classic nine choirs of angels. John Milton’s Protestant angels debate in majestic parliament with God. William Blake’s equivocal angels are full of fierce energy, and the cold, Islamic angels of Rainer Maria Rilke’s haunting “Duino Elegies” are distant, awesome and terrifying.

By comparison, the guardian angels of the current American movement come across as either celestial boy scouts or substitutes for the doting grandparents the visionaries never knew. In all that they do, writes AngelWatcher Freeman, guardian angels are “givers, providers, facilitators; they are not generals, bosses, commanders.” But in the Bible that’s exactly what the most prominent angels were. To the ancient Israelites, angels were proud members of God’s heavenly court, fierce captains of a heavenly army who defended nations, delivered powerful messages and spent their free time singing God’s praises. In dealing with humankind, they could be harsh as well as kind, judgmental as well as supportiveapt manifestations of a commanding, demanding God whose mysterious ways are not our own. Above all, their duty is to do God’s will, not man’s, as signified by the “el” (Hebrew for Lord) in the names of the only angels identified in the Scriptures: Michael (who is like God), Gabriel (God is my strength) and Raphael (God has healed),

In the New Testament, angels lose little of their awesome presence. Even in the tender Nativity stories, Gabriel strikes fear in Mary at the Annunciation; at Jesus’ birth, fellow angels make the simple shepherds quake. Jesus himself clearly believed in angels and considered them warriors at his command. For the Apostle Paul, it was a matter of great consequence that Christians believe the risen Christ to be more powerful than the heavenly host. To literary critic Harold Bloom of Yale University, who is writing a book on angels, memory and the millennium, “Everything that makes angels interesting–their sheer size, their otherness, their menace, their power and, above all, their ambivalence toward human beings–has been eliminated in the current crop of American books.”

In truth, the most important source of angelology is not the Bible. That honor belongs to a library of extra-Biblical Jewish, Christian and Gnostic texts written between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200 that present a cosmos teeming with angelic activity. It was from these books, inspired by Zoroasttrian cosmology, that Jews, Christians and Muslims developed their most vivid accounts of angelic wars in heaven, the transformation of Lucifer into Satan and the apocalyptic confrontations between good and bad angels at the end of the world. Significantly, however, the new breed of American angelologists gives evil spirits only begrudging acknowledgment. They’re around, like negative thoughts, but will go away if ignored. In “Ask Your Angels,” the authors reveal that Lucifer, “despite his loving intentions,” has been miscast as the evil one. “In reality,” they write, he is “an aspect of God dedicated to our growth by helping us strengthen our spiritual muscles.” If only Lucifer could get in touch with his inner angel.

What does remain of the classical tradition is the division of good angels into nine heavenly choirs in three descending orders. The invention of a sixth-century Syrian monk, known as Dionysius the Areopagite, this neo-Platonic scheme puts the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones closest to God, followed by the Dominations, Virtues and Powers, with the Principalities, Archangels and garden-variety guardian angels hovering closest to earth. To Saint Thomas Aquinas, who devoted one twelfth of his Summa Theologica to speculations on angels, what distinguishes one order from another is the purity and simplicity of their intuitive intellects. The farther they are from God, who knows all things in Himself, the more closely do their mental processes approximate humankind’s labored and limited intellect. Still, each angel was awesome, each a species unto itself, asexual and possessed of a free will.

Medieval theologians never discussed how many angels can dance on the point of a pin–a canard of Enlightenment cynics. But they did provide Christian culture and art with a breathtaking image of an ascending order of cosmic perfection. From inert matter to the limitless Godhead, they envisioned a great chain of being in which angels filled the spiritual gap between the human and the divine. Within that gap, Saint Albert the Great calculated, there were exactly 399,920,004 angels–which was only a celestial handful more than the 301,655,722 determined by the Kabbalists of medieval Judaism.

As Americans, today’s angelologists are uninterested in hierarchy. Nor do they much care how many angels there are, as long as there are enough to go around. What interests them are the guardian angels and what they can do–right now–for us. “With angels around, people feel they don’t have to bother an Almighty God in order to get help,” says Prof. Robert Ellwood, a specialist in unorthodox religions at the University of Southern California. At First Church of the Angels in Carmel, Calif., for instance, minister Andre D’Angelo, 81, calls on angel power to help his clients work out “unresolved traumas.” D’Angelo compares God to the CEO of a large corporation. “You can’t always get through, but you can always reach a good executive secretary,” he reasons. “An angel is like a good executive secretary.”

New Age believers see angels through crystal-clear images. Lori Jean Flory, 36, of Aurora, Colo., has been experiencing angels since the age of 3. Some of them are 50 stories high, she says, some human scale. Usually they appear as light in motion with a vaguely human shape, and the message is always the same: “They want us to know our pure essence is pure light and pure love.”

To the discerning ear of critic Harold Bloom, the yearning to become like angels–to have angels in our own image–is not new. It is the American version of the old Gnostic quest to experience the self as an uncreated spark of God. Stripped of their visions and miraculous stories, says Bloom, “the interest in angels is about not wanting to die.” In their encounters with angels, so the reasoning runs, human beings gain experimental assurance that they, too, have a heavenly home. That’s no small comfort: most mortals, other than Mormons, don’t expect to be transmogrified into angels themselves. But the heavenly realms are vast, and, without bodies, there’s no fear of a housing shortage.

Burnham, whose books are becoming the angelologists’ sacred texts, can only shout “amen.” “We need not be afraid to die,” she writes with the force of revelation. “That we do not die’ This I have learned. This much I have seen with my own eyes.” The angels tell her so.

title: “Angels” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-26” author: “Leo Barton”