<p>Suddenly the heavenly host is upon us, and in the New Age a
grass-roots revolution of the spirit has all sorts of people
asking all sorts of questions about angels
</p>
<p>By Nancy Gibbs--Reported by Sam Allis/Boston, Nancy Harbert/Angel Fire and Lisa
H. Towle/Raleigh, with other bureaus
</p>
<p> What idea is more beguiling than the notion of lightsome spirits,
free of time and space and human weakness, hovering between
us and all harm? To believe in angels is to allow the universe
to be at once mysterious and benign. Even people who refuse
to believe in them may long to be proved wrong.
</p>
<p> Christmas may not be the time to judge the popularity of angels;
this is, even among skeptics, the season when we pay attention.
We make them in snowdrifts, hang them on trees, bake them on
cookies, play them in pageants. Hillary Rodham Clinton has a
gold pin she wears on days she needs help: angel's wings, she
explains. She made angels the theme of the White House Christmas
tree this year.
</p>
<p> But long after the carols fade and the stars dim, the angels
will still linger. In the past few years they have lodged in
the popular imagination, celestial celebrities trailing clouds
of glory as they come. There are angels-only boutiques, angel
newsletters, angel seminars, angels on Sonya Live. A TIME poll
indicates that most Americans believe in angels. Harvard Divinity
School has a course on angels; Boston College has two. Bookstores
have had to establish angel sections. In the most celebrated
play on Broadway, Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-prize-winning Angels
in America, a divine messenger ministers to a man with AIDS.
In Publishers Weekly's religious best-seller list, five of the
10 paperback books are about angels.
</p>
<p> This rising fascination is more popular than theological, a
grass-roots revolution of the spirit in which all sorts of people
are finding all sorts of reasons to seek answers about angels
for the first time in their lives. Just what is their nature?
Why do they appear to some people and not to others? Do people
turn into angels when they die? What role do they play in heaven
and on earth? While the questions have the press of novelty,
they are as old as civilization, for the idea of angels has
hovered about us for ages.
</p>
<p> Glancing around the gift shops, one might imagine that their
role is purely decorative. Holiday angels are luscious creatures,
plump and dimpled, all ruffled and improvised. In their tame
placidity they bear no relation to the fearsome creatures in
the Bible and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens.
Jehovah's angels are powerful creatures; in Genesis they guard
the east gates of Eden with flashing swords; in Ezekiel they
overpower the prophet with awesome visions, four-headed, multiwinged
and many eyed; in Revelation they do battle with a dragon. Milton
describes the "flaming Seraph, fearless, though alone, encompassed
round with foes." And Rilke wrote, "If the archangel now, perilous,
from behind the stars took even one step down toward us, our
own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death."
Every angel, he declared, "is terrifying."
</p>
<p> In their modern incarnation, these mighty messengers and fearless
soldiers have been reduced to bite-size beings, easily digested.
The terrifying cherubim have become Kewpie-doll cherubs. For
those who choke too easily on God and his rules, theologians
observe, angels are the handy compromise, all fluff and meringue,
kind, nonjudgmental. And they are available to everyone, like
aspirin. "Each of us has a guardian angel," declares Eileen
Freeman, who publishes a bimonthly newsletter called AngelWatch
from her home in Mountainside, New Jersey. "They're nonthreatening,
wise and loving beings. They offer help whether we ask for it
or not. But mostly we ignore them."
</p>
<p> Only in the New Age would it be possible to invent an angel
so mellow that it can be ignored. According to the rest of history,
anyone who invites an encounter with an angel should be prepared
to be changed by it. By scriptural tradition, angels pull back
the curtain, however briefly, on the realm of the spirit. In
offering a glimpse of a larger universe, they issue a challenge
to priorities and settled ways. One need only remember the modest
girl from a poor family whose life was forever transformed by
the message Gabriel brought--that she would bear a son and
name him Jesus.
</p>
<p> ANGELS ACROSS THE AGES. If there is such a thing as a universal
idea, common across cultures and through the centuries, the
belief in angels comes close to it. Jews, Christians and Muslims
have postulated endlessly about angels' nature and roles, but
all three religions affirm their existence. There are angels
in Buddhism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism; winged figures appear
in ancient Sumerian carvings, Egyptian tombs and Assyrian reliefs.
Visible or invisible, in disguise or in full glory, angels appear
in more than half the books of the Bible: it was an angel who
told Abraham to spare his son from sacrifice, who saved Daniel
from the lion's den, who rolled the stone away from Christ's
tomb. Muslims believe that angels are present in mosques to
record the prayers of the faithful and to testify for or against
people on the Day of Judgment.
</p>
<p> Medieval theologians believed that angels had to exist to fill
the gap between God and humankind. In ancient civilizations,
whose multiplicity of deities socialized freely with mortals,
there was little need for divine intermediaries. But a faith
in one just and awesome God invited the comforting intercession
of angels to bridge the vast divide. Fear of death and of eternal
damnation inspired a belief in winged spirits who could move
easily between the layers of the universe. Angels were said
to move the stars, spin the planets, make plants grow and help
creatures reproduce. They were there to do God's bidding, but
also to ease man's arduous journey from corporeal to spiritual
life.
</p>
<p> By the Middle Ages theologians had constructed an intricate
model of heaven, based on the writings of the fifth-century
theologian Dionysius. They divided the heavenly host into nine
choirs, each with its own task. Contrary to the mocking of modern
skeptics, medieval theologians did not spend time debating how
many angels could dance on the head of a pin. They had far more
serious enterprises in mind. In their layered architecture of
heaven, the highest angels were the seraphim and cherubim, those
closest to God in nature, who exist to worship him. The thrones
bring justice; dominions regulate life in heaven; the virtues
work miracles; the powers protect mankind from evil; the principalities
are concerned with the welfare of nations; and the archangels
and angels serve as guides and messengers to individual human
beings.
</p>
<p> The early Protestants, on the other hand, had little use for
either the image or the idea of angels. They rebelled against
the "decadent" decoration of Renaissance churches, with their
lavishly winged, lushly adorned angels acting as God's attendants
but reigning supreme over earthly citizens. In building a new,
democratic model of church life, the Protestant reformers not
only swept away the papal bureaucracy of Bishops and Cardinals,
but the angelic hierarchy as well. Man could commune directly
with his Maker without a winged messenger intervening. And God
for his part could move the planets through the skies without
calling upon angels to push them.
</p>
<p> In the centuries since, few Protestant theologians have addressed
the subject. The modern exception is Billy Graham, whose 1975
book Angels: God's Secret Agents was a national best seller:
2.6 million copies. In a sense it was a natural outgrowth of
his biblical scholarship; one cannot believe in a literal interpretation
of Scripture and dismiss the role that angels play throughout
it. Furthermore, for many theologians the belief fulfills the
promise of a merciful God. In the face of war, hunger, AIDS,
drugs, sorrow and fear, only a force more potent than any earthly
power could provide peace. "These are desperate times," says
Peter Kreeft, a philosophy professor at Boston College. "People
seek supernatural solutions to their problems. We want to reassure
ourselves of our spiritualism."
</p>
<p> THE ANGELIC NATURE. Angels, the scholars take pains to explain,
are not gods, and they are not ghosts or spirits of the dead.
They do not spend time "trying to earn their wings," like the
sweetly ministering Clarence of It's a Wonderful Life. "I know
of no place in classical theology where humans become angels,"
notes the Rev. John Westerhoff, a pastoral theologian at Duke
University's Divinity School. "Angels were created separately
and were given free will, just as humans were. That's why there
were fallen angels, like Satan. Their fallenness had to do with
a denial and distortion of angelic life just as our fallenness
has to do with the denial and distortion of goodness and truth."
</p>
<p> Philosopher Mortimer Adler attributes the fascination with angels
to the intriguing idea of minds without bodies--especially
superior minds freed from the frailty and limitations of perishable
bodies. "They are not merely forms of extraterrestrial intelligence,"
he notes. "They are forms of extra-cosmic intelligence."
</p>
<p> As for their physical nature, angels were traditionally said
to assume bodies only as needed to carry out a task. This meant
that they had no gender, despite the sentimental Victorian image
of the pale virgin with wings. Milton's angels, however, among
the most vivid in literature, were robust figures who ate and
drank freely. Raphael, in fact, "with a smile that glowed/ Celestial
rosy red," blushingly explained to Adam and Eve how angels make
love, "Easier than air with air, if spirits embrace,/ Total
they mix, union of pure with pure/ Desiring."
</p>
<p> Along with the debate over their form comes the tricky question
of why some people can "see" angels while others cannot. "Angels
exist through the eyes of faith, and faith is perception," observes
Westerhoff. "Only if you can perceive it can you experience
it. For some, their faith doesn't have room for such creatures.
That's not to demean their faith. That's just the way they are;
they can't believe things that aren't literal, that are outside
the five senses."
</p>
<p> In her best-selling collection of angel encounters, A Book of
Angels, author Sophy Burnham writes that angels disguise themselves--as a dream, a comforting presence, a pulse of energy, a person--to ensure that the message is received, even if the messenger
is explained away. "It is not that skeptics do not experience
the mysterious and divine," she explains, "but rather that the
mysteries are presented to them in such a flat and factual,
everyday, reasonable way so as not to disturb." The rule, she
says, is that people receive only as much information as they
can bear, in the form they can stand to hear it.
</p>
<p> ENCOUNTERS WITH ANGELS. Maybe it is not surprising that people
who believe they have had an encounter with angels are among
the most reluctant to discuss them. Yet there is an uncanny
similarity in the stories and a moving conviction behind them.
Very often the recognition comes only in retrospect. A person
is in immediate danger--the car stalled in the deadly snowstorm,
the small plane lost in the fog, the swimmer too far from shore.
And emerging from the moment's desperation comes some logical
form of rescue: a tow-truck driver, a voice from the radio tower,
a lifeguard. But when the victim is safe and turns to give thanks,
the rescuer is gone. There are no tire tracks in the snow. There
is no controller in the tower. And there are no footprints on
the beach.
</p>
<p> Those who have an angel story often point out that they couldn't
make up the vision they saw. Ann Cannady recalls the day in
July 1977 when a third test result confirmed she had advanced
uterine cancer. "Cancer is a terribly scary word," she says.
Her husband Gary, a retired Air Force master sergeant, had lost
his first wife to the same type of cancer and did not know whether
he had the strength to go through it again. "We spent the next
eight weeks scared and praying, praying and scared," says Ann.
"I kept begging God, saying, `Please, if I'm going to die, let
me die quickly. I don't want Gary to have to face this again.'"
</p>
<p> Ann is convinced that her prayers were heard. Even years later,
the memory remains as vivid as it is out of this world. One
morning, three days before she was to enter the hospital for
surgery, Gary answered the doorbell. Standing on the step was
a large man, a good inch taller than her 6-ft. 5-in. husband.
"He was the blackest black I've ever seen," Ann says, "and his
eyes were a deep, deep azure blue." The stranger introduced
himself simply as Thomas. And then he told her that her cancer
was gone.
</p>
<p> "How do you know my name, and how did you know I have cancer?"
stammered Ann. Then she turned to her husband and asked, "What
do we do, Gary? Should we ask him in?"
</p>
<p> Thomas came inside and again told them she could stop worrying.
He quoted scripture to them--Isaiah 53: 5: "...and with
his stripes we are healed."
</p>
<p> Ann, still confused, looked at the man and demanded, "Who are
you?"
</p>
<p> "I am Thomas. I am sent by God."
</p>
<p> Next, Ann recalls, "he held up his right hand, palm facing me,
and leaned toward me, though he didn't touch me. I'm telling
you, the heat coming from that hand was incredible. Suddenly
I felt my legs go out from under me, and I fell to the floor.
As I lay there, a strong white light, like one of those searchlights,
traveled through my body. It started at my feet and worked its
way up. I knew then, with every part of me--my body, my mind
and my heart--that something supernatural had happened."
</p>
<p> She passed out. When she awoke, her husband was leaning over
her asking, "Ann, are you alive?" and pleading for her to speak
to him. Thomas was gone. Ann, still weak from the encounter,
"crawled over to the telephone and called my doctor's office
and demanded to speak to him right that minute. I told him something
had happened, and I was cured, and I didn't need surgery. He
told me stress and fear were causing me to say things I didn't
mean."
</p>
<p> In the end they reached a compromise. Ann would show up at the
hospital as scheduled, but before the operation the surgeons
would do another biopsy. They would keep her on the operating
table at the ready. If the preliminary test came back positive
they would proceed as planned. When Ann woke up, she was in
a regular hospital room, the doctor at her bedside. "I don't
understand what's happened," he said, "but your test came back
clean. We've sent the sample off to the lab for further testing.
For now, though, you appear to be in the clear."
</p>
<p> There has been no recurrence of the cancer. At first Ann was
hesitant to talk about it for fear that people, including her
children, would think she'd "lost it." They didn't. Even her
doctor, she says, acknowledged at one point that he'd "witnessed
a medical miracle."
</p>
<p> The experiences of an angelic presence seem to occur most often
in moments of heightened awareness--when everyday life has
already been disrupted by some pressing fear or obstacle. Though
often cast as rescuers, angels also seem to intervene to remove
not the danger but the fear of it. Among the most memorable
stories of World War I is the tale of the Angel of Mons. In
August 1914 during one of the first battles of the war, British
and French troops were retreating from a German assault. As
Burnham tells the story, the wounded soldiers were taken to
field hospitals where one, then another and another, told the
nurses of seeing angels on the field. The French saw the Archangel
Michael, riding a white horse. The British said it was St. George,
"a tall man with yellow hair in golden armor, on a white horse,
holding his sword up, and his mouth open, crying `Victory!'
" The nurses reported a startling serenity in the dying men,
as though they had nothing to fear.
</p>
<p> Some soldiers later speculated that their exhaustion had brought
on hallucinations. Others thought it was mass hysteria, the
result of a battle that was supposed to be easily won by the
allies but had turned into a rout. But later stories emerged
from the German side of the same incident. The Kaiser's soldiers
said they found themselves "absolutely powerless to proceed...and their horses turned around sharply and fled." The
Germans said the allied position was held by thousands of troops--though in fact there were only two regiments there.
</p>
<p> The gift of comfort is a powerful theme in angel stories; whether
on the battlefield, in the hospital wards, or at the bedside
of the dying, angels are traditionally portrayed as bearing
souls away to heaven. They reassure both the patients and those
they love that whatever will come next is not to be dreaded.
"When Christians die," Graham writes, "an angel will be there
to comfort us, to give us peace and joy even at that most critical
hour."
</p>
<p> Melissa Deal Forth, 40, a filmmaker in Atlanta, will never forget
the day her husband Chris Deal died: it was exactly one year
after he had been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia.
The last months had been gruesome: treatments that could not
save him, nights when she could not sleep. But she was sleeping
soundly at his hospital bedside on the morning of Jan. 4 when
Chris managed, somehow, without being seen or heard, to maneuver
himself and his portable IV pole around her, out of the room
and past the nurse's station with its 360 degrees view of the
ward. All Melissa remembers is being shaken awake at 3 a.m.
by a frantic nurse who was saying something about not being
able to find Chris.
</p>
<p> Melissa hit the floor running. As she approached the elevator
she happened to glance toward the chapel, where she glimpsed
Chris sitting with a man she had never seen before. Frightened
and furious, she burst through the door, firing off questions.
"Where have you been? Are you okay?"
</p>
<p> Chris just smiled. "It's fine," he told her, "I'm all right."
His companion remained quiet, his eyes on the floor as though
not wanting to be noticed. He was tall, dressed rather like
Chris usually did, in a flannel shirt, new Levis and lace-up
workboots that appeared as if they, too, had just been taken
off the shelf. "There was no real age to him," Melissa says.
"No wrinkles. Just this perfectly smooth and pale, white, white
skin and ice blue eyes. I mean I've never seen that color blue
on any human before. They were more the blue like some of those
Husky dogs have. I'll never forget the eyes."
</p>
<p> Chris seemed to want to be left alone, and so she reluctantly
agreed to leave. When he came back to his room, she says, "He
was lit up, just vibrant. Smiling. I could see his big dimples.
I hadn't seen them in so long. He didn't have the air of a terminally
ill and very weak man anymore."
</p>
<p> "Who was that guy?" she asked.
</p>
<p> "You're not going to believe me."
</p>
<p> "Yes, I will."
</p>
<p> "He was an angel. My guardian angel."
</p>
<p> Melissa did believe him. "All I had to do was to look at him
to know something extraordinary, something supernatural had
happened."
</p>
<p> She searched the hospital to find the man. There was no one
around, and the security guards hadn't seen anyone come or go.
"After the visit, Chris told me his prayers had been answered.
I worried for a while that he thought the angel had cured his
cancer. I realize now it wasn't the cure, it was the blessing
he brought with him. It was the peace of mind." Chris died two
days later.
</p>
<p> In the 11 years since Chris's death, Melissa says not a day
has gone by when she has not thought about the angel and what
he did for her husband. "Chris' life could not be saved, but
the fear and pain were taken from him," she says. "I know what
I saw, and I know it changes lives. Never, never, never will
anyone be able to convince me that angels don't exist."
</p>
<p> THE DEBATE IN THE CHURCHES. So much lively spiritual activity
might come as a welcome sign to mainline churches, whose memberships
have dwindled over the years. Some see the movement among conservative
Christians as a backlash against secular society. "Angels are
reassurance that the supernatural and the realm of God are real,"
says Richard Woods, a Dominican priest and an author of books
on angels and demons. "They are a reaffirmation of the traditional
vision of a Christian world when that vision is under attack."
Retired rabbi Morris Margolies, author of an upcoming book on
angels in Judaism agrees. "We're living in an era very similar
to the Maccabean era for the Jews," he says, "where disaster
confronts us on all sides. People are looking for simple answers."
</p>
<p> But other clerics are not so sanguine; in many ecclesiastical
quarters, the angel revival is a cause for some alarm. Ministers
see in the literature the makings of a New Age cult, an easy,
undemanding religious faith that may also represent a rejection
of mainstream church life. "When you don't believe in God, you
believe in every god that comes along--a tame, domesticated
one with a small g," says Malcolm Warford, president of Bangor
Theological Seminary. "When you trade mystery for security,
you end up with a trivialization."
</p>
<p> In the eyes of traditional church leaders, the popular authors
who render angels into household pets, who invite readers to
get in touch with their inner angel, or summon their own "angel
psychotherapist," or view themselves as angels in training are
trafficking in discount spirituality. And the churches are at
a loss for a response. "What's troubling is that many religious
leaders today acknowledge this but don't know what to do about
it," admits George Landes, professor of Old Testament at Union
Theological Seminary. "They remain skeptical of the extravagance
of angelology but don't know what to put in its place. It's
a real struggle."
</p>
<p> Even within the Roman Catholic Church, there is debate over
how to handle this revival of interest. Angels are still important
in Catholic devotions and are included in the new Catholic catechism.
From childhood, Catholic children have learned the "Prayer to
the Guardian Angel," and those who attended Catholic school
were often told to leave a little room at their desks for their
guardian angels. But the church remains suspicious of reports
of supernatural interventions, notes Lawrence Cunningham, chairman
of the theology department at Notre Dame. Cunningham has little
use for the present popular fervor. "If people want to get in
touch with their angels, they should help the poor. If they
want to get in touch with their angels, they'd be a lot better
off working at a soup kitchen than attending a seminar."
</p>
<p> The emphasis on angels as divine intermediaries, theologians
worry, just creates a greater distance from an ever more abstract
God. And to the extent that angels are always benign spirits,
it evades any reckoning with the struggle between good and evil.
"I'm certain that if we are to solve the problems on earth,
we will have to do it ourselves," says playwright Tony Kushner.
The angel in his play in no way is meant to absolve humans of
tough choices and hard spiritual work. "New Age theology says
we live in a benign universe where all you have to do is ask
an angel for help. This makes things like Sarajevo difficult
to understand." Kushner is especially troubled by the suggestion
that angels appear only to some people and not to others. "I
find that horrendously offensive," he says. "The question is,
why are you saved with your guardian angel and not the woman
who was shot to death shielding her children in Brooklyn three
weeks ago? That suggests a capricious divine force. If there
is a God, he can't possibly work that way."
</p>
<p> Most devotees of angels don't pretend to have found a way to
confound Providence and repel disaster. They do, however, suggest
that the very idea of angels seems to act as a means of grace.
In Los Angeles, artist Jill D'Agnenica has been scattering angels
all across the neighborhoods that were ravaged by riots last
year. In April, on the first anniversary of the turmoil, D'Agnenica
distributed four 12-in.-tall plaster magenta cherubs at a prominent
African-American church. She has continued to set the brightly
painted angels on street corners, at bus stops, on walls, in
parks, atop trash piles and in empty lots, always 10 to the
square mile--1,000 in all so far, with 3,600 more to go. "The
experience of seeing an angel," she says, "or even more important,
when word gets out, the act of looking for an angel, would remind
each person of their place in the City of Angels."
</p>
<p> The act of looking for angels is an exalting gesture. To the
degree that this search represents the triumph of hope over
proof, it may be a good and cheering sign of our times. For
all those who say they have had some direct experience of angels,
no proof is necessary; for those predisposed to doubt angels'
existence, no proof is possible. And for those in the mystified
middle, there is often a growing desire to be persuaded. If
heaven is willing to sing to us, it is little to ask that we
