23:24: "But the chieftains of his (Noah's) folk, who disbelieved, said: This is only a mortal like you who would make himself superior to you. Had God willed, He surely could have sent down angels. We heard not of this in the case of our fathers of old."
Noah was born with the light of prophets on his forehead. God created that light before Adam and He caused it to pass from one generation of prophets to the next until the Seal of Prophets, Muhammad.
After he received the prophecy Noah preached for nine hundred years. The angelic light in him shone forth and even the animals and stones were praising God when they saw him. Yet Noah's people were so stubborn that he succeeded in calling only eighty persons to the true faith, among them three of his sons. In the end Noah was fed up and he asked God to be relieved from the task of constantly calling in vain. God accepted Noah's request and decided to send the Great Flood as a trial for human beings. When the command came for Noah to build the ark, he asked for instructions and God sent him Gabriel to teach him how to build it.
Gabriel ordered the angels of safety to collect the best timber for a ship to resist the Waters of Wrath. The angels brought Noah a pile of wood and timber from the cedar-trees of Lebanon which were later used to build the Temple of Solomon. They placed the wood in front him. The pile was so great that from whatever point of Noah's country one looked at it, that pile always seemed to cover the sky above one's head. Noah took one splinter of that pile and from it began to build a huge ark.
Never before had a ship been built in that country. Noah's country did not meet the sea or any other great body of water. His people scoffed at him, saying: "A ship in the middle of a plain!" and: "How should there be a flood in this country which hasn't even seen rain in so many years?"
Gabriel instructed Noah how to piece together the hull of the ship with one hundred and twenty-four thousand planks. On each of these planks was inscribed the name of one of the one hundred and twenty-four thousand prophets who were to appear from the beginning of creation to the end of times, starting with Adam. God created an angel to safeguard and insure the soundness of each plank even after it had been incorporated into the ship. This was done to show that God protects his creation with his beloved ones among the angels and the prophets. God places within creation itself the causes and effects of salvation and the road to Paradise. God saves His beloved servants time and again with the arks of salvation brought by the angels. In times of disasters, plights, wars, famines, and great depressions, angels never fail until today to bring help and relief for those who ask. The following story illustrates this.
In the middle of this confusion, a lady is screaming in the basement: "I forgot, I forgot!" What did you forget? people around her ask her. But she keeps screaming, "I forgot, I forgot!" all the while tearing her hair by the roots and slapping her cheeks. Meanwhile, the building seems to be swaying left and right from the vibrations of exploding shells all around our neighborhood. Every one is feeling his heart breaking into pieces and his very veins buzzing unbearably, because the kind of rocket that is raining uses a chain of explosions close-packed together, of the type called `anqudiyya or cluster-bomb in Arabic.
The overall feeling is that the moment of death has come. Everyone reaches for their children and covers them with their arms, so that they may be taken with them and not leave them alone in death. At that moment, love of mothers for their children shone. So did love of fathers, husbands and wives, and all family members who counted together the moments that remained before they would leave this life. Everyone recited the prayers that he or she knew, busy with his or her own person, engaged in private supplication to God for salvation. The whispering and the chanting of prayer was the only sound other than the sound of exploding shells above us. Nothing broke the gloom of this small basement except a few candles lit here and there, giving us hope like islands of light in a sea of darkness.
The intensity of the bombing reaches its peak. The shells have reached us, and we are all going to be shattered to pieces. The building is crumbling like cardboard, and the stones and bricks are heard falling around the streets of the neighborhood, like hail on the head of people on a winter day. In the middle of this rain of stones over human heads, the lady's voice also reached its peak, and she was now heard screaming: "Please! Let someone help my child! Someone help him! He is dying! He has been killed!" But no-one can see who she is referring to, and no-one is able to help her.
My sister took some cool water and tried to bring the lady to her senses by throwing water on her face, at the same time she kept asking "where her child was so that she could be rescued." My sister called me: "Come and help me with her." I came and helped, and she said: "Please! I forgot my daughter. " Where? "In the tenth floor, in our apartment." My face turned pale. I looked into my sister's eyes, interrogating her without speaking, but she understood that I was telling her: "There might no longer be a tenth floor, or a fifth floor, or even a ground floor over us! Can we even get out of this basement alive?" People huddled around us, and we began to hear knocks on the metal door of the basement. The door was open from outside, three men and two ladies rushed in, shouting to us: "Close it behind us, close it quickly!" They had come at high speed with their car, not knowing where to go until they glimpsed the basement entrance to our shelter. They had jumped out of their car and rushed in for cover. We gave them some water and tried to calm them down from the shock of what they had seen outside. Their faces and clothes were covered with blood as they had been helping transport the wounded and the dead in their car.
One of the newcomers said: "The streets are littered with the dead. We don't know who to pick up anymore. Complete buildings have been razed to the ground. It is horror, disaster! I looked in turn at the first screaming lady, and then at the lady who was speaking. I said:
- "What about our building?"
- "Which building do you mean?"
- "This building, our building!"
All five newcomers cried out in a confused clamor:
- "There is nothing left outside, there is no more building! We saw a ruin of four or five floors' height, that's all that's left!"
When the first lady heard this, we thought she was going to go mad or even fall dead. All turned to her with baited breaths, ready to catch her if she fell. But the contrary happened. She seemed to calm down all of a sudden, catching her breath and becoming firm, staring at a corner of the basement. Her face changed colors, from pale to pink, her eyes became full of light, even smiling, and her mouth fell gaping as she said in a whisper:
- "O my God -- O my God -- O my God!"
Everyone forgot about the shelling. We became oblivious to the apocalyptic thunder outside; instead, there was silence all around us. Every heart suddenly felt this great peace covering us all around, like a big mantle of quiet and rest, taking us to a different place in a short moment. Everyone stared in the direction of the lady's stare, but no-one could see what she was seeing. She stammered:
- "O my God! I can see your angels! I can see your helpers with their wings, helping my daughter, they came to help us!"
As soon as she pronounced the word "angel," everybody felt a cool breeze, fragrant with an inexpressible perfume of flowers and fresh scents, covering the sulfuric smoke that had been drifting in from outside.
The candles went out. An immense light appeared, filling the whole basement and seemingly expanding it infinitely. Everyone froze in their place, unable to detach their gaze from this great cloud of light, staring at the light without the slightest strain, although it seemed many times as intense as the sun itself! Tongues were muted. No-one breathed. An immense peace descended, and all the suffering and shelling of the last few hours was forgotten.
The lady was now in a state of happiness, and all anxiety had disappeared from her. "Angels are saving my daughter." She kept repeating this, despite the apparent incongruity of her phrase, because everyone had thought that the building above us had been reduced to rubble and all the lives of those still in it, lost. Yet everyone now firmly believed that anything could happen because of the state we had entered, although anyone hearing this from the outside would consider it nonsense that the lady's daughter could still be alive.
My sister looked at me silently begging for some kind of answer. I stared back, eyes wide open, as if telling her: "God is great, He can do anything, even send His guardian angels to heal the wounds of helpless people who supplicate Him." She understood, and the reflection of this message seemed to enter her heart in waves of spiritual energy, now overflowing her heart and reaching the hearts of others all around us. Everyone seemed aware of a special event happening to them, which they had never experienced before in their lives.
My sister had been suffering from cancer for several years. A gynecologist by profession, she understood more than anyone else the facts about cancer and the gravity of her situation. She had undergone surgery and many treatments of chemotherapy. Doctors had finally told her that she had but a few months left to live. She was now in pain at the thought of death knocking at her door and about to enter, in addition to the pains of the disease itself and its harrowing treatment.
She was looking at me as if trying to ask: "If this visitation is real -- if it is happening that that woman's child is being helped by an angel, and we are seeing something to prove it -- why doesn't the same angel also touch me with his miraculous healing, and save me as other people are being saved?" I understood all this in a moment, and we had not exchanged a single syllable.
I felt then and there that my sister was desperately asking, with all her heart, for help. She was trying to reach for the robe of an angel, clutching it in a last-minute attempt to be saved, as if this precious moment might not be repeated again in her lifetime. Something amazing and unexpected immediately followed this silent dialogue: my sister was now gazing at the corner of the basement with the same stare that we had seen on the face of the woman who was missing her daughter. My sister's tongue began to move and stammer involuntarily: "My brother, my brother, an angel is coming towards me! O my God, O my God!" Everyone stared but no-one could see, as the angel was visible only to her, as it had previously been visible only to the woman. Yet the light in the room seemed to multiply again and again.
My sister screamed: "He is healing me! The angel is healing me!!" Then she fainted. Everyone was in a dilemma, wondering who to help: the first lady or my sister? But no-one moved, as we were all frozen in our respective places and unable to take it all in other than to say: "God is great." In the middle of this state of confusion and spiritual wonderment, everyone heard a distinct knock on the small metal door of the basement. Yet no-one could move from his place, afraid to lose this state of ecstasy and return to the world of bombs, the noises of war, the smells of fire and gunpowder, and the sight of the dead and wounded.
Each one of us felt responsible for opening the door, and yet legs seemed pinned in their places and no-one was moving. Among all these people, two children broke loose from their parents' arms, a boy and a girl, and ran toward the basement door. The parents screamed: "Come back, come back!" but the children were answering: "Angels, angels!" All eyes were on the children, and the parents were unable to move even one inch from their places to catch their children.
Everyone's heart stopped at the thought that the children might go out and be hurt by the shelling. Amazement grew tenfold at a new sight: the children were no longer walking on the ground, their feet were now raised one inch above the ground, and they were walking on thin air! Their parents lost their voices and were now questioning their senses. The children took over, as if pitying their parents' loss for words, and said: "Mom, dad, angels are coming to our help. Don't be afraid. They will deliver us."
The children must have taken but a moment to reach the door; for everyone else, however, it seemed like a year. What was happening with the children? Were they even the same children anymore, or were they angels in the disguise of children? Who was knocking at the door? As the children were approaching the door, we did not seem to hear knocks anymore, but musical sounds charming our ears and flowing into the air. Wonder, confusion, expectation, suspense: the first lady and her daughter, my sister's sight and her loss of consciousness, the silence, the light, the fragrance surrounding us, the knocking at the door, the children floating on the air and calmly announcing the presence of angels, all this seemed too much for us to understand.
For all its strangeness, everything we had seen so far belonged to the three dimensions; we apprehended it with the senses of our physical bodies, or at least tried. Everyone felt that what lay behind the door, however, was going to be completely different and unprecedented and unimaginable. It must surely be from a fourth dimension, a door to Paradise, an interaction with the heavenly world itself, not only with one or two of its inhabitants or with the elements of fragrance and sound.
In less than one second of the children's time they reached the door. Without their touching it, it opened by itself in front of them. We could see nothing through the door: no stairs leading to the street, no stone structure, not even ruins, nothing but an immense light. That light poured into the basement, sending in waves and waves of a visible energy carrying with it effects that reached the hearts; for we all felt a great effulgence of love and utter happiness in our hearts, a love we had never felt before in our lives. It did not equal even the most intense raptures of our adolescence.
We were in a trance. The two children vanished in the light, no longer to be seen. All eyes were transfixed, casting impossible gazes at the disappearing children, but unable to follow them into the light. The union of the children with the light caused the light to change colors, like a radiant rainbow, and affected our states as well, as if we were now seeing the children move into paradise with the eyes of our hearts rather than those of our heads.
A brief moment passed. The light was still there. Two children had gone into it, but now three were returning. They were holding hands. They seemed to saunter out of the fourth dimension of Paradise back into our third dimension..
The children looked airy and subtle, seemingly translucid, as if
they were now angelic beings.
Their own light kept changing like the light that was coming through the
door.
An innocent gesture, typical of children, assured us that it was them:
they were holding hands and moving in a circle, chanting a rhyme:
"We are the angels, we are the guardians,
We are those who love you and care for you."
As the light began to diminish little by little, the people began to feel that their powers of movement were coming back to them. The state of ecstasy was lessening and abating in our bodies and our hearts. The children were slowing down in their caroling. They turned towards their parents and began to make their way back to them. All of us were looked at the third child, a little girl who jumped into the basement and ran to the lady who had been crying at first. We understood that this was the daughter she had been worried about for leaving her on the tenth floor of the building.
Everyone had forgotten about my still-unconscious sister, including myself, instead looking at the children and expecting to hear from them some description of what they had seen. The joy of the parents cannot be described. The lady of the tenth floor who had thought that her child was lost with the rest of the building now was seeing her running towards her and holding her in her arms, and she had not even forgotten to bring her Barbie doll with her! The mother was hugging her child, kissing her, and mumbling unintelligible words of thanks and prayers, unable for emotion to speak coherently.
During that joyful event, some other people and I were trying to reanimate my sister after we ourselves had just regained our normal state of consciousness. Others, however, were asking the little girl to tell how she had managed to come unscathed from the rubble and destruction outside. I was losing nothing of the many questions that were beginning to burst out from every mouth, pricking up my ears to hear any answer when it came. At the same time I was throwing some cologne water on my sister's face and tapping it lightly, comforting her back to health.
The little girl was speaking in a mixed state of happiness and fear: she was happy because of what she had seen in the world of angels, and she was afraid from the intensity and emotion of the people's questioning that had suddenly erupted around her. She was surprised at their agitation and at the reaction of her mother, not realizing what all the fuss was about; she had just been visiting with her friends, the angels, and now here she was. What about the tenth floor? What about your room? But the little girl only said: "Mom, why are you crying? Why are you kissing me as if you had not seen me for a week?" The mother kept hugging her dear child, continuing her muted, grateful prayers.
The little girl began to hug her Barbie doll, exactly as her own mother was hugging her. Each feared the loss of the little baby whom she held dear: the mother feared for her little daughter, the daughter feared for her little Barbie doll.
The little girl said: "I was in my bed when I felt someone touching me and calling me. I thought it was mom, but I never felt myself carried up and held that way before! I opened my eyes and I smelled a very nice breeze filling my room. I saw a lady coming to me, accompanied by an angel. Where my room had been there was now a great space without end and without beginning. The lady took me by the hand, and the angel carried both of us. I was about to cry, and the lady said to me: 'Why are you crying, sweetheart?' I said: 'I forgot Barbie.' The lady said: 'No, she is here with you, look under your arm.' I looked, and I found that my Barbie was with me. Then I looked around and began to shout: 'Where is my mother? What is happening? Where are you taking me?' And they said: 'We are taking you to your mother. We are your guardian angels.' Then I met the two children who were waiting for me in the hallway, where everything was light. The angels taught us a song and we began to play with them and go around. It was so nice! Then they told us that we had to go back to our parents and we came here."
The children did not seem to realize the extraordinary nature of the little girl's account, and of their entire experience of the last hour. We looked at them, then looked at each other in amazement and disbelief. Surely other people had to be told all this. Would they believe us? We did not wish the moment to end. We wanted to hear more. All these thoughts came to us at the same time, and above the din of these reflections one clear thought emerged and imposed itself: angels had come to our rescue and had brought us this precious moment of relief and mercy.
We had not forgotten the one among us who was lying on the ground: my sister. She was slowly coming to, and looked around her to see if the vision was still present. Someone handed me a cup of water with some drops of rose water in it. I gave the glass to my sister to moisten her tongue and quiet her nerves. She was at first unable to relate anything of what had happened to her. She drank some more water and slowly took in the surroundings, feeling more secure and happy as she came to understand the reunion scene that was taking place before her.
My sister then looked at me, and I understood from her eyes that she was ready to tell me what had happened to her and what she had observed under the touch of the angelic vision she had experienced. Everyone became quiet again, wanting to hear her story as well. It seemed like the soldier's rest after the excitement of battle. If someone had dropped a needle on the floor you could have heard it, although the fighting was still going on outside. Inside, the atmosphere of peace and happiness had disconnected us completely from the bedlam of war.
As she prepared to speak, everyone began to anticipate great news of j oy and deliverance from her as well, although they had not heard anything yet. She said: "Praise God! He heals and he forgives. As soon as you saw me fainting, I woke up somewhere else and was looking at everyone. I felt like a patient undergoing anesthesia, but the 'going under' was spiritual . The angels were operating on me. I saw three of them: one on my right side, one on my left, and one above me. The latter one said to me: 'We are the healing angels, and we came to help you by God's permission. Nothing prevents us from curing anyone who seeks our help, and here we are!'"
"They were holding my hands on my two sides, and I felt a state of peace in my whole body. It made me feel light and relaxed. The familiar pain of many years of cancer treatment had left me. Then the angel above me showed me a staff of light which he was holding in his hand. He told me: 'There are points in the human body which, if anyone touches them, will cause healing in the entire body. I am going to touch them with this needle of light.' He proceeded to direct his staff at several points over my body, touching one cell-point each time and healing the cells that corresponded to it. 'These dead cells are given life another time through this touch,' he said."
"The operation extended over my entire body. I was able to count 365 different points to which he turned his staff. The angel said to me: 'Each point represents a day of the year. If you keep your body balanced through that year, all your years will be balanced, and your life's age will be balanced as well.'"
We had all been overwhelmed by the events that had happened, and now the secret knowledge which had been revealed to us added to our amazement. My sister continued: "The angel advised me that I must follow a certain diet which I must not leave for the rest of my life. In order to balance these life-points in the body, I must drink every day, in the early morning, before eating or drinking anything, a small cup of onion juice which will revive the dead cells that the cancer thrives upon to extend over the body. The angel said that this recipe should be followed by all who suffer from cancer."
We continued to listen to my sister's account of her angelic encounter, drinking in the many details which confirmed and reinforced the veracity of her experience in the light of the little girl's parallel journey. Each person in the basement was transformed that day. What irony that the day which had begun as one of the darkest in our lives, now seemed destined to be remembered as a day of special joy and blessing, to be recounted for a long time to come as one of the best in our lives! The people continued to recount their feelings and hear each other's impressions, seemingly for hours. When the excitement abated, three hours had passed, and a lull had replaced the chaos of indiscriminate shelling outside. Everybody prepared to leave the shelter and go back, as much as possible, to the normalcy of daily life.
When we came out we saw the extent of the damage. We realized that we had also been part of the angel's miraculous deed, as we had been spared and our basement protected from the bombing which had reached every spot around it. We left the city and made our way to my brother's house in the North of the country. There we healed our wounds and rested for a while. My sister faithfully followed the angel's recipe. After three months, she went back to her doctors at the American University of Beirut. To everyone's surprise, there was no trace of cancer left in her entire body. No-one could explain what had taken place and the doctors were mind-boggled. They did not even know how to trace the process of healing and found themselves unable either to describe it or to duplicate it. Of course, they took the causes of healing forwarded by my sister, the angel's operation and the recipe with a big grain of salt, although she was like them a medical doctor. "Our colleague has had great luck," they said, "and is under the emotional stress of an unexpected, miraculous recovery." Miraculous it was, but more literally so than they could possibly imagine.
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