Angels Among Us

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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.' "