On Angels

In the previous post, “A Space for the Spiritual,” I briefly wrote about the Evangelical environment in which I was raised. For a time, my father decided that we would attend a different church (for reasons I am still unaware of). This other church was Baptist, which appeared to me to be Evangelicalism with a slightly cooler youth group. Insofar as the sermons were concerned, it felt very much the same. Satan was everywhere and The Gays and The Democrats were subverting traditional family values. Nothing new there.

One thing I hadn’t mentioned was the church’s stance on angels. With the popularity of ABC’s Touched by an Angel and WB’s 7th Heaven (too racy for our household), you might expect that angels would be a safe and approved topic of interest. You would be mistaken. Angels existed, but they were better left within the pages of the Bible and on top of the Christmas tree. The understanding was that if a miracle occurs, they do so because of God and not His messengers. The belief in Guardian Angels persisted among the congregation, although they acted more as invisible hands of God, never to be directly perceived or even acknowledged.

Above all else Evangelicals fear idolatry.

Being God’s “first draft” at perfection, angels were thought to be inferior to humans. We were made in the perfect likeness of God. The angels grew jealous of His love for us and so rebelled against God; hence the reason why Satan, a fallen angel, tempted Eve into eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Over the centuries entire volumes of theological musings have been written on his very subject; most of which can be boiled down to men fearing the roles of women as midwives, healers, councilors, and warrior-leaders in pre-Christianized societies, and then blaming them for mankind’s separation from God.

The trouble here is that Evangelicals are literalists. To them, the Bible is not a collection of lessons on how to live a meaningful or holy life. It is a factual and historical document. God literally wrote the Bible. Noah literally put two of every animal on the ark. They do this because if one particular event, the raising of Jesus from the dead, were made allegorical, their entire belief structure would crumble.

I got a little distracted here, but all of this is to say that angels were both a dangerous distraction from God and a near non-factor in the modern world. This helps explain why the following experience was both so impactful and terrifying.

During the summer of ‘07, at the age of seventeen, I had, what is called in Jungian psychology, a “Big Dream” in which I met with the Archangel Michael. While asleep, I had been transported to the top of a mountain. This mountain, much like the pond in my previous post, was floating in Space, though its base was covered in a dense fog that extended far past my perception. Above me were countless dazzling stars. No larger than a coin did the Earth look from this distance. Appearing in front of me flashed a brilliant cobalt blue light, and from this light formed a figure. I was capable of only a moment to gaze at their face. Their visage was drastically unlike the popular portrayal of him on candles and statues. I saw not a handsome winged man but a face so non-emotive and genderless that I thought it to be a glazed ceramic mask. Unable to tolerate the intensity of their light, I fell to my knees and shielded my eyes. They placed their hand atop my head and, in a low yet silvery voice, said, “I am Michael. Your time has come.” With that, I saw visions of mass destruction. Meteors crashed into the Earth, floods carried away entire cities, people clawed atop one another within deep chasms, and I saw all of humanity perish.

This Big Dream was a pivotal encounter with daimonic reality. Nonliteral imagination understands this dream not as a portent of doom but as a transformative initiation into the daimonic realm. In another post, I will explain to the best of my ability what I mean by “daimonic reality,” a term coined by author Patrick Harpur in his book, “Daimonic Reality: Understanding Otherworldly Encounters.” Daimons, such as Archangel Michael, have a long tradition of sending Apocalyptic visions to those who become initiated into the daimonic. Never have the visions come to pass, especially when a doom date is given, but this does not make them unreal. They are real in that they expose the uninitiated to the power and severity of the daimonic realm. The initiate’s previous self is destroyed, and in its place is a new self, neither of this realm nor the daimonic; they straddle between.