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I was brought up to believe in angels and, as a pupil in a two-room Catholic school, to pray to my guardian angel before recess each day. Like my classmates, I delivered the prayer in a rapid-fire monotone, but I was nonetheless praying to an angel.
In the course of our school lessons, angels came and went, appearing to virgins, wrestling with prophets, and even challenging the authority of God (and didn't THAT lead to trouble!). I don't remember any math problems based on the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, but we were just one step away from that.
Angels afford endless speculation to theologians of all religions. Christian theologians revealed a lot about themselves when they drew up their hierarchy of angelic orders, insisting that there were seven angelic divisions headed by archangels and categorically stating that the various seraphim, cherubim, and others added up to a total of 496,000 angels.
When I withdrew from my childhood religion, having chanced upon its enormous feet of clay, I threw out the baby with the bathwater. I renounced angels as well as the dogma that I found as encrusted with man-made rules as a sunken ship is with barnacles. Organized religion and its baggage were not for me.
Well, you can take the girl away from the angels, but apparently you can't take the angels away from the girl. When I began writing stories from my life, I gradually saw that the stories were connected by two themes: first, every story involved an automobile; and second, I was a lucky duck to have survived each event. It was not a great leap to realize that angels must have been involved. It couldn't have been coincidence alone that led to my escaping my just deserts so many times. The conclusion was inevitable: angels were in my life!
When these stories took place, angels were far from my mind. I neither believed nor disbelieved; I just didn't give them a thought. But it is clear from the stories that the angels were there. If you believe in angels, that is.
Now, I see that angels guide my life. Something kept me safe through that series of missteps, misadventures, and just plain stupidities. Maybe it wasn't angels, for how on earth can one tell for sure? For my part, I don't categorize my angels as the medieval theologians did. I don't even envision them. I just know that some energy, some spirit or being, has, many times during my life, turned away almost certain disaster. I have to admit that these may not have been MY angels. It's quite possible that they were protecting another person in my little drama: someone else, for example, in that car that spun off the road. So I won't claim any of these as my own personal guardian angel. But some force, some being or group of beings, has exerted a lot of effort over the years, and I certainly did profit from it.
So I say hallelujah!
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