Crosstalk: Do angels walk among us?

Artist and children’s author Maurice Sendak described the experience in an interview with Terry Gross, host of “Fresh Air” on National Public Radio:

“I remember once I didn't blink, and I saw it, or imagined I saw it. It was so very vivid, I can describe it even now. I was watching out the window, without blinking, and something very large, almost like a dirigible... but it wasn't a dirigible because it was passing by my window. It was a slow-moving angel.

“He, she, whatever, was moving very gracefully and slowly, coming from left to right, passing very slowly by my window. I have no memory of the face, but I remember the hair, the body and the wings. It took my breathe away. It just moved so slowly, I could examine it minutely.”

As a little boy growing up in rural Oregon, one of my earliest memories is of my grandmother telling “flannelgraph” stories to us children.

A flannelgraph is a storytelling system that used a board covered with flannel fabric, resting on an easel, to which paper figures could be placed and moved about as the story unfolded. It was very similar to the “fuzzy felt” toys of today.

There were figures of Jesus, Mary, King David, shepherds, prophets, cattle, sheep and lions. Pretty much every biblical character you could think of was to be found in grandmother's flannelgraph boxes, and I would take them out now and then.

Among the most beautiful were the angels, with huge white wings and flowing robes edged in gold.

As kids we were told that we were each of us born with a guardian angel, which seemed reasonable enough to me and is perhaps a good explanation of how we managed to survive our childhood relatively unscathed.

My older sister's guardian angel was especially active. She was surrounded throughout her childhood by the miraculous, and managed to hold onto her angel well into adulthood. As a teen she was driving home from church, and somehow ended up in a ditch. She got out of her car and was wondering what to do when two men dressed in white, driving an unmarked white tow truck, stopped and pulled her back onto the road.

She was convinced they were angels.

I met my first angel in college. I was riding my motorcycle to college on Interstate 205, running late for a final exam, when my bike sputtered and died.

I rolled to a stop, realizing instantly that I was out of gas. I had just decided in desperation to push my bike to the nearest exit when a man stopped, asked me if I needed help.

I said, “no, I just ran out of gas.” He pulled a can out of the back of his pickup and started pouring it in. I warned him I only had $5 – it was a $10 can, even back then – and he just laughed, emptied it into the tank and drove away. I arrived for the exam at the last possible moment.

He wasn't dressed in white, but then I don't think any guardian angel of mine would be able to survive in unsoiled white for long even with divine support.

And then one day, driving up the Clackamas River in winter, I killed my angel.

I was passing along the edge of a cliff when I decided to pull off the road and turn around because of the ice. I started my turn, and was suddenly racing backwards toward the cliff, my heart in my mouth.

There was a “Bang,” and the car stopped suddenly.

When I got out, I found that my bumper was about two feet from a low snow bank on the edge of a 50-foot cliff that dropped into the river. The snow bank had fresh snow, and no mark from my bumper at all, just some light tracks that my sister would surely have identified as a wing marks.

There is no logical explanation for my car having stopped when it did.

It must have been quite a bang, though, because judging from subsequent events, my guardian angel never recovered.

— Mark Gibson

When my son was deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2008, he led a squad of Marines on a night patrol along the Euphrates River.

Jesse’s combat assault team was tasked with stopping insurgents from slipping over the border of Syria near Al-Qa’im and using the waterway to reach enemy forces in Al Anbar Province.

Jesse, then a first lieutenant, took point on the patrol along the river’s embankment. He and his men were exhausted after long adrenaline-filled hours in the field and looking forward to returning to camp to grab some hot chow and a few hours of sleep.

As they passed a grove of trees along the trail, Jesse thought he saw the shadow of a man carrying an AK-47. He motioned for the Marines to take up a defensive posture and then studied the tree line. For long minutes, the Marines scanned the terrain, but there was no movement in the shadows and no one fired upon them.

Finally, Jesse decided to move forward, but he varied their route slightly so they would be less exposed to sniper fire.

The men reached camp safely and were able to bed down for a few hours.

Early the next morning, Jesse decided to return to the scene of the previous night’s incident to rout out any enemy fighters.

When he arrived at the spot where he had halted the patrol, Jesse saw that, less than two feet from where he stood the night before, and where he would have walked if the Marines had stayed on the same path, there was a metal plate. It was the pressure plate of a bomb.

To have stepped on it would have caused an explosion big enough to have taken Jesse out, as well as other members of the squad.

There was no sign of any human activity in the trees when the Marines checked out the site.

Did my son see an angel? Different versions of his story that cannot be explained away are repeated over and over on battlefields. Any combat veteran is likely to have one.

I prayed for my son’s safety multiple times a day while he was at war. I like to think that Jesse had a special detail of angels watching over him. He operated at that time with the attitude, “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time,” and shrugged off my warnings to be safe. So, I asked that his angels be on high alert at all times.

I can’t explain why some people at war live through perils that should have killed them and yet others die. I do believe there are angels among us working a divine plan that we, as humans, cannot comprehend.

It is interesting to contemplate the spiritual realm that runs parallel to ours but is not visible to the human eye. Both good and bad angels at work on a plane of existence that calls to our spirituality but can be known only when we pass to the next level.

There are nearly 300 references to angels in the Bible. We are told that, if we are saved, there will be guardian angels sent to protect us and be a help when necessary.

We are also told not to glorify the angels because they are entities that carry out God’s will and, in Revelation 22:9, refer to themselves as “fellow servants” with us.

There are dozens of scriptural examples of angelic encounters so we know that God does use these beings to accomplish certain things.

The Bible says (Mat-thew 25:31) that at the end of the present age, angelic hosts of heaven will accompany Christ as He comes again in glory. \

At other times, however, they will be unrecognized because they appear as ordinary humans.

The Bible says in Hebrews 13:2 that “some people have entertained (or welcomed) angels without knowing it.”

We might all have met an angel during our travels through life. That seems as good an incentive as any to be sure we are treating people with dignity and respect at all times.

We will likely never know how often our guardian angels intervened to save us from some great harm.

I suspect my son kept his angels plenty busy (and still does) and that they have a major case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

— RaeLynn Ricarte