When you hear the term “angel” what do you visualize or think of ? If you are of the 70’s and late 90’s generation you may well think of “Charlies Angels”. How often have you referred to someone, whether a child or someone close, “you are my angel”, or my “precious angel” ? Have you ever been in a position of possible peril or harm and for some strange reason you back away or are “saved” and you thank your “guardian angel” ? Whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs angels do evoke a response, a reaction and a feeling .
Below are a few descriptions I took from a quick internet search. I invite you to share your thoughts, stories, impressions and beliefs about angels. Do they exist? What do they mean to you?
“Angels are among the unseen in the “all that is, seen and unseen” that the Nicene Creed says the Father created. They can think and hold conversations, and they have their own identity. And they appear to people of all religions, even those of no religion at all. No one can prove angels exist; they are, after all, spiritual beings and don’t fit into material-world rules. Not all religious folks believe in angels. (for instance, the Jewish Sadducees, and many modernist Christians). But those who have a strong sense of spirituality tend to believe angels are real, and sometimes experience their presence. Thus there are many angel reports from India, Malaysia, and other Asian countries.”
“Angels are not there to be meddling fix-its, but our helpers in responding to the truth. Angels guide us in a way towards a specific situation, sometimes calling us to take a specific action. We can just blow them off, but people usually find themselves responding instantly with some amount of trust, comfort, or awe.”
From Wikepedia,
A 2002 study based on interviews with 350 people, mainly in the UK, who said they have had an experience of an angel, describes several types of such experiences: visions, sometimes with multiple witnesses present; auditions, e.g. to convey a warning; a sense of being touched, pushed, or lifted, typically to avert a dangerous situation; and pleasant fragrance, generally in the context of somebody’s death. In the visual experiences, the angels described appear in various forms, either the “classical” one (human countenance with wings), in the form of extraordinarily beautiful or radiant human beings, or as beings of light.
In the US, a 2008 survey by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion , which polled 1,700 respondents, found that 55 percent of Americans belief including one in five of those who say they are not religious, believe that they have been protected by a guardian angel during their life. An August 2007 Pew poll found that 68 percent of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world”.
In Canada, a 2008 survey of over 1000 Canadians found 67 per cent believe in angels.