Angels Among Us

By NANCY GIBBS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.' "

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.

"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?"

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."

Ann, still confused, looked at the man and demanded, "Who are you?"

"I am Thomas. I am sent by God."

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."

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."

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."

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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

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?"

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."

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."

"Who was that guy?" she asked.

"You're not going to believe me."

"Yes, I will."

"He was an angel. My guardian angel."

Melissa did believe him. "All I had to do was to look at him to know something extraordinary, something supernatural had happened."

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.

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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

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 be ready to listen.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 500 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on Dec. 2 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4.5%. "Not sures" omitted.

CAPTION: DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE EXISTENCE OF ANGELS?

DO YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE YOUR OWN GUARDIAN ANGEL?

WHICH BEST DESCRIBES WHAT YOU BELIEVE ANGELS TO BE?

HAVE YOU EVER PERSONALLY FELT AN ANGELIC PRESENCE IN YOUR LIFE?

DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE EXISTENCE OF FALLEN ANGELS, OR DEVILS?

With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston, Nancy Harbert/Angel Fire and Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh, with other bureaus