And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf’s foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass. And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings. Their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward. As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle. Thus were their faces: and their wings were stretched upward; two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies. And they went every one straight forward: whither the spirit was to go, they went; and they turned not when they went. As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps: it went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning. And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning. Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went.
—EZEKIEL 1, KING JAMES VERSION
WHEN WE LOOK up into the sky, we do not see the same thing that a peasant from the Middle Ages would have seen. For him or her, the fixed stars and the wandering stars, in their related yet subtly different shifts of position through the seasons, suggested a series of heavenly bands or levels, each watched over by a different angelic intelligence. In this view, which a member of that society didn’t experience abstractly but as vividly as he or she experienced the people and objects of earth, each set of stars represented an ever-subtler rung on the staircase of angelic levels: levels that led, ultimately, to the empyrean—the highest part of heaven, where God dwelt in his infinite majesty.
The angels that dwelt in these different levels were beings who, while exhibiting a different kind of intelligence from that of humans, were not cut off from human intelligence and human reality. They were creatures of the same cosmos and creations of the same God, so no matter if it might be difficult to understand or even picture them, the cosmic family connection we humans shared with them prevented them from ever becoming “alien” in any modern sense of the term. The world, after all, might have been fallen, and satanic evil and human sin might have been to blame for that fall, but it was still one world. And the Fall, terrible as it was, took place within a larger narrative of revolt and ultimate redemption: a drama in which the angels, both the good and (of course) the bad ones had key roles to play. Because of all these facts, the lowest peasant, gazing at the night sky, sensed in her bones her profound connection and communion with those worlds above.
Imagining what it might have been like to live in such a densely populated universe of matter and spirit is difficult from our perspective, where for many people the night sky appears as vast and beautiful, but essentially chaotic and empty—a place of extreme temperatures and impossible distances, completely bereft of human or spiritual meaning.
The need to map out the cosmos in terms of the kinds of angels that inhabited it arose early on. The first detailed description of angelic hierarchies came from a fifth-century AD writer named Dionysius the Areopagite—or, as he is more commonly known, Pseudo-Dionysius. The “pseudo” comes from the fact that Dionysius, while framing himself as a certain Dionysius who was a contemporary of Saint Paul’s, in fact wrote his tract on the celestial hierarchies and his other celebrated works some five centuries after Paul’s time. The practice of taking the name of an illustrious predecessor was common in the ancient world, and the fact that Pseudo-Dionysius was not the Dionysius he claimed to be shouldn’t detract from his writings, which have a surprising life and resonance even for a modern reader.
Whether one is of a faith that believes in angelic hierarchies or not, the most important thing to take away from Pseudo-Dionysius’s vision of the hierarchies is the idea—central to Catholic thinkers such as Saint Thomas Aquinas as well—that angelic intelligence is ordered and alive from top to bottom. Far from the marvelous but ultimately meaningless swirl of matter and energy that materialism sees when it looks at the night sky, the old Dionysian/Thomist universe is a genuinely living thing. According to the Dionysian system, the guardian angels are at the bottom of the angelic ladder, which makes sense when we consider that they are the ones entrusted with helping us on our way through life. Above these are a series of higher levels of angels, extremely difficult for us to envisage, which exercise a broader and more distanced influence on worldly doings: the powers and principalities are said to govern entire countries, while the levels above them are ceaselessly worshipping God.
The highest orders—the cherubim and seraphim—are so impossibly distanced from us that it is not hard to believe that many of the UFO encounters reported in recent decades might have to do with them. This does not mean that the floating disks so many people have reported in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are literally these angelic beings. Things angelic are never as simple as that. But the overlaps between the ways UFOs look to the modern people who have seen them and the way the higher, stranger angels looked to the ancient people who saw them are (as many have pointed out) suggestive. Suggestive of what? That UFOs are “really” angels? That angels are “really” UFOs? Both . . . and neither. As usual in this area, those in search of absolutely solid, two-plus-two-equals-four answers are out of luck. The world is, quite simply, more complicated than many of us take it to be, and this is especially the case when we come to the mysteries of perception: of what is there and what is not there.
Cherubim, the Old Testament relates, were set up at the entrance of Eden to bar Adam and Eve from attempting to reenter it. They also appear on the ark of the covenant in Exodus and elsewhere. These beings, from which the word cherub developed, were far from the cute and cuddly floating babies we tend to associate with the name. Originally they were large, four-legged beings whose appearance echoed the massive and similarly named winged gods that appeared in cities of the ancient Near East long before the arrival of the Hebrews.
Envisioning Ezekiel’s description of the cherubim is difficult, yet these beings have a clear enough message for us: in their roundness they are whole beings. Second, they are covered with eyes. This, at first pass, sounds either bizarre or simply grotesque. These beings initially seem more like something from a fifties monster movie than from heaven. But the rhetorical style of the prophets is not always easy for a modern reader to find his or her way into, just as with the fantastically image-rich language of John of Patmos in Revelation. In trying to come to terms with the angelic beings that Ezekiel and John of Patmos describe, we have to take the key features they have and override our initial desire simply to picture an earthly being with these qualities. What we have to do instead is take the three chief features that the higher angelic beings are described as having—roundness, wings, and eyes—and imagine what a creature that is more than we can physically imagine might be like if it were characterized above all by these features. What we get if we do this is a being that can see everywhere (omniscience), move everywhere (omnipotence), and which is completely whole. Nothing is hidden from it, nothing is unreachable to it, and (spiritually speaking) it lacks for nothing. That is the truth hiding behind the more bizarre descriptions of angelic beings in the Bible that have puzzled so many readers.
The keynote of creation is variety. One of the most beautiful books I ever came across (I stumbled on it in a library) was an enormous volume filled with plates of hundreds of intricately rendered paintings. The subject of the paintings, and of the book, was the different varieties of crabs found in a single bay in Japan.
If we look around and take into consideration the vast number of species in the material world, and the lines of similarity (and dissimilarity) among them, the notion that the spiritual worlds contain such a variety becomes quite easy to believe.
By suggesting that the chain of creation does not stop at the visible world but continues beyond it, we are making an argument much stressed by Saint Thomas Aquinas—an individual who wrote a great deal on angels (and devils). It’s an argument that makes sense—not just in Aquinas’s time, but ours. To grasp it requires only that we grant that the hierarchy of God’s creation might not stop precisely at the spot where the recording instruments for reality currently at our disposal do. The deeps of the sea were long thought by science to be completely empty—until we developed the technology to get down there and see for ourselves. Surprise of surprises, they were teeming with life, and a lot of the creatures discovered there were so bizarre that it was at first hard for the initial explorers of those depths to believe what they were seeing.
For our purposes, the angelic beings most of interest are those closest to us: the guardian angels who have been tasked with looking out for us while we writhe and struggle through the confusions of material existence. This is the level whose “job” is to watch us closely as we go through the rough and bumpy burlesque of our lives, attempting to give advice when it seems most possible that this advice will be taken seriously.
Not all faith traditions believe in guardian angels—Catholics usually do; most Evangelicals do not. But no matter what one’s position, it is an interesting exercise to understand how someone who does believe in these beings experiences them, to understand what a living relationship with the angelic hierarchies—particularly the guardian angels that are “closest” to us, spiritually speaking—is like.
If you are a pet owner, you will have an easier time conceiving what this relationship might look like. You love your dog. Your dog loves you. That is clear. And yet, you are beings that possess entirely different styles of intelligence. Your dog understands some things, yet is hopelessly and bewilderingly unable to understand others. You are, cognitively speaking, superior to your dog. Does that mean you are better than your dog? Not in the least. You are simply plugged into a different landscape of understanding. You are at home with abstractions. Your dog is not. On the other hand, you walk into a forest with little awareness of the life it contains. Your dog, meanwhile, steps into the woods the way you surf the Internet. Information, via the dog’s sharpened senses, comes in from every direction, and the dog instantly and easily knows how to read it. So much so, in fact, that he can get impatient with you when you (inexplicably to him) fail to pick up on some crucial piece of information, like the fact that a mere ten paces off the trail you are on, a three-days-dead squirrel cries out for closer inspection. How dumb can one be?
You and your dog get along great. You understand and respect each other, in the way that fellow beings should. All the same, you are different. As a human, you have been gifted not just with consciousness, as your dog has, but with self-consciousness. That means that you not only know about things, but you know that you know about things. You are one step further up the ladder of existence than your dog is.
Does that mean that you can’t genuinely connect with your dog, that you can’t keenly love it and suffer terribly when it dies? Absolutely not. You and your dog, representatives of different bands on the ladder of being, are capable of being true friends despite all the vast differences of perception and understanding that divide you.
I don’t know what guardian angels look like. (If you are open to getting an opinion on the matter, consult the works of the modern Irish mystic Lorna Byrne, who has seen angels since childhood and describes them in overwhelming detail in several books.) But I can, to a degree and thanks to the relationships with animals that I’ve enjoyed over the course of my life, extrapolate what my relationship to an angel might be like.
My guardian angel sees me—all of me. While I drift in and out of connection with my real self, sometimes floating perilously far away from it and sometimes coming wonderfully close, my guardian angel does not have to suffer theses vagaries of distance. He (or she, or it; opinions differ) is always in touch with the real me, even if I am not. If there is one chief duty of the guardian angel, it is to keep us in contact with the being we are at our truest and deepest—to not let the distractions and attractions of the world so pull us off our center that we lose touch with who we truly are. I suspect that, if guardian angels do exist, they must suffer quite a bit of pain as they watch what their individual charges do down here on earth and how often they fall into foolishness and falsity.
Physicality is, if nothing else, a fiendishly well-designed place for losing track of one’s true identity. But in the end, there is no escaping that identity, no escaping who we truly are or at least were meant to be. According to an ancient Persian tradition, we will, at death, meet our angel—that being in the spiritual world that has been monitoring our odyssey in the physical world, year by year and moment by moment. If our behavior has been bad—if we, through our actions in life, betrayed the ideal that was set up for us before we were born—then the face of our angel will be terrifying. It will manifest, in visual form, the ugliness of what our straying from the true path looks like. (High school readers of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray will recognize what’s going on here.)
But if we have lived a life in sync with our angel (which, I’ll stress again, does not mean a life of simply following the rules, of simply doing what others tell us, but of following our heart), then the being we meet at death will not be horrible, but beautiful beyond imagining. Goodness, love—these are real things, not abstractions. They are as real as kerosene, as real as explosions that level buildings. Goodness, as it turns out, is not to be trifled with. It is not to be bullied. It is not to be compromised. Nothing can touch it. And it seems that, though the individuals involved in angelic encounters may not always express it this way, angels’ behavior delivers the same essential message. In this world where everything seems corruptible, there is a level of being that is acutely aware of the difficulties of this world but not (even remotely) touched by it. Angels comfort, angels heal, angels (sometimes) terrify. But most important, they manifest, and in that manifestation lies their singular gift to humankind.
It’s an odd fact, but a fact all the same, that the single most inexplicable example of guardian angels entering into the human world happened just two hundred miles northeast of Spanish Fork as the crow flies. Not too far from the Utah-Wyoming border, there lies a little town called Cokeville. Some thirty years ago, the citizens of Cokeville were witness to the single largest act of domestic terrorism at that point in American history. On a blustery spring day in May of 1986, a man named David Young arrived at the Cokeville Elementary School in a large van with the windows painted over so that no one could see its contents. With him were his teenage daughter Princess; his wife, Doris; and a homemade bomb designed to kill every child in the school.
Cokeville was and is a town much like Spanish Fork. Like Spanish Fork it was born with the Mormon migration in the mid- and late 1800s. Like Spanish Fork it is still largely Mormon. And like Spanish Fork it is an example of what an American town can be at its best: a place where different people with different ideas about politics, religion, and whatever else live in a spirit of mutual respect and togetherness.
Cokeville also has an excellent school system, something David Young knew well, because several years before the day that he pulled up at Cokeville Elementary in his van, he had spent a brief time as Cokeville’s sheriff. Young had not lasted long in the position because, as one member of the Cokeville Police Force said, he was “more interested in being Wyatt Earp than a good cop.”
The bomb that Young brought to Cokeville Elementary that day didn’t look like much to an untrained eye. Housed in a shopping cart procured from a local supermarket, it was composed of a gallon jug of gasoline, a large battery, and a series of “blasting caps”—containers with a highly volatile mix of gunpowder, powdered aluminum, and powdered chromium. The principle of the bomb was that an initial explosion would cause the containers of powdered metal to blow up and disperse through the air. A second explosion would then ignite those particles, in effect creating a solid block of pure fire. Among bomb experts, it was known as a “dead man’s bomb,” for the simple reason that it was extremely effective at killing large amounts of people.
Young, with his wife and daughter behind him, rolled the shopping cart up to the receptionist, who gave him a friendly hello and asked how she could be of help. Young announced that he was taking over the school and demanding a ransom of two million dollars for every child in it. Young gathered all the students and teachers into a single classroom and outlined his intentions to children and adults alike. Pointing to two safety pins connecting a bracelet on his wrist to the bomb by way of a long shoelace, Young explained that should anyone do anything he didn’t like, he would give his wrist the mildest of jerks, the safety pins would come apart, and the bomb would ignite, killing Young and everyone else in the room, and flattening the entire school as well.
That Young meant business—and was clearly deranged—became fully apparent to the teachers when he had Doris pass out mimeographed pages laying out his personal philosophy. (Right after entering the school, Princess had lost her nerve and fled, so the task of assisting Young fell entirely on his wife.) Young’s situation was this: Tired (as he saw it) of being smarter than everyone else yet having to suffer the indignities of employment by individuals inferior to him, he had plunged into a solitary study of the nature of the world. This study had eventually led him to develop a philosophy of his own. In this philosophy, no God existed, but reincarnation did. The children of Cokeville Elementary were extremely fortunate, for David was planning on taking all of them with him to die and be reincarnated on a planet where he would become their own private god, instructing them in the ways of the universe and developing a whole new civilization of truly educated beings.
Cokeville was the perfect town for Young to use to launch his plan for two reasons: its children were very well educated and hence would make great pupils for him in the world to come, and the town itself would be very easy to manipulate. Why? Because in the course of his time there he had come to appreciate what a tight-knit community it was. Everyone in Cokeville, Young knew, cared for everyone else. And this was especially the case when it came to their children. By kidnapping all those children at once, Young thought he would instantly make the town putty in his hands.
Young was, to say the least, a seriously unbalanced individual, but he was so in a way that grimly prefigured the behavior of the lone-wolf terrorists who have created so many ugly headlines in America in recent years. In a world without true community, the evidence would suggest, David Youngs multiply like rabbits. When David Young took over Cokeville Elementary with his homemade bomb and homemade philosophy, however, the occurrence raised eyebrows across the country and beyond much more than it would today. That is because Young was, in terms of his derangement, way ahead of his time, and what he attempted at Cokeville became one of the first examples of what can happen when people abandon not just civic but spiritual community and drift off into themselves.
In charge of communicating between Young and the outside world was the school’s principal, Max Excell. At one point, Hartt and Judene Wixom write in their excellent book on the event, When Angels Intervene to Save the Children, “Excell thought the man was calm enough to risk a question. ‘Why this school?’ he asked, keeping his voice very low. ‘Why here?’ ”
To Excell’s surprise, Young answered.
“Because this is a family town,” Young told Excell, “where people love their children, and they’ll do anything to get them back.”
As the afternoon dragged on, the teachers did everything they could to keep the kids calm, encouraging them to play games and talk quietly among themselves. Sitting by his deadly contraption, Young was quiet most of the time, but as the minutes ticked by he seemed to grow more sullen. It fell to Doris to communicate Young’s wishes to the kids and the adults. Some of the kids later recalled that she had seemed like a “nice lady,” while others had felt she was as “bad” as the man with the beard in the center of the room.
At 2:00 p.m., the teachers started to notice that in addition to being hot and stuffy, the classroom was filling up with a sweet, queasy, familiar smell. Gasoline was leaking from a small crack in the gallon jug that Young had procured for his bomb that morning. Before too long the children began to feel sick, and some started throwing up. A teacher dared asking Young to open the windows, and he agreed.
At 3:45, Young decided he needed to go to the bathroom. The room watched petrified as Young removed the shoelace trigger from his own wrist and put it on Doris’s.
Leaving Doris, Young headed for the bathroom. The Wixoms continue:
Once David was out of sight, the children relaxed. But with the removal of the tension he generated, they immediately became more restless and noisy as well. “Children!” said Jean Mitchell, “we need ‘Quiet Time.’ ” In the mounting hubbub, she was beginning to feel ill. David had not reappeared and Jean did not want him suddenly walking out into even the semblance of disorder and confusion. Raising her hand to her head, she admitted to Doris, “I’ve got a headache.”
Doris knew just how she felt. She’d had the same horrible headache from the gas fumes for some time. She reached her hand to her own forehead in sympathy. And as her hand went up, it yanked the string, just ever so slightly, and the two clips disengaged. The bomb went off.
Pandemonium is an interesting word. It was first coined by John Milton when he wanted a name for the stronghold of fallen angels who sought to rise and enter Eden to corrupt Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. In its more modern meaning, it describes exactly what followed after the bomb went off. Smoke and flames filled the room. Screaming children and teachers struggling to get them to the windows and out to safety moved around in a thick cloud of smoke that obscured practically everything.
Emerging from the bathroom, Young saw one of the male teachers running for the exit doors and shot him in the back. The bullet missed his heart by an inch, leaving him seriously but not critically wounded. He kept running, escaped the school, and lived.
The next person Young saw was his wife, Doris, who had received the brunt of the bomb’s force and was running out of the classroom, covered in flames. Young dropped to one knee and expertly placed one shot through her head (out of anger or out of compassion for her state, no one knows). Next he saw one of the female teachers, Eva Clark, who was leading a troop of her students to the exit doors as well. Clark and Young looked at each other, and Clark was sure she was dead. But Young didn’t shoot. Instead he turned, went back to the bathroom, sat down on the tiny toilet he had just left, put his favorite, personally engraved pistol under his chin, and fired.
Choking on the black smoke and not knowing if Young was still alive and a threat, police and rescue personnel swarmed into the building. Hysterical parents, having waited out the long afternoon, struggled to get in as well. How many children had been killed? How many teachers?
As the smoke cleared and the rescuers continued picking among the wreckage, the incredible truth emerged. Only two people had died in the explosion: David Young and his wife, Doris. Some of the kids and teachers had been burned, a few severely, and some severely enough that they would have to endure weeks or months of painful recovery. But no one else died.
Given the power of the bomb and Young’s ingenuity in building it, how could this have happened?
The remains of the bomb were examined by a local explosives expert named Richard Haskell. Taking the device apart, he discovered something remarkable. Two of the wires connecting the battery to the blasting caps had been clipped, preventing the juice from getting to them when Doris tripped the bomb. Because of this, the power of the bomb had been radically diminished. But why were the wires clipped? No one had had access to the bomb other than David, and he certainly was not the one to have clipped them. The fact that the wires were clipped simply made no sense. Yet all the same, there it was.
Further strange discoveries followed. It turned out that the crack in the one-gallon plastic jug that contained the gas for the bomb had caused gas to drip down onto the blasting caps, turning the powder within them into a paste that was far less deadly when the bomb finally went off than it would have been had the powder stayed dry. So not only did some of the blasting caps not explode, but those that did, exploded with only a fraction of the force they would have, had the gas not leaked onto them.
There was something stranger still. Instead of blowing straight out, as a dead man’s bomb normally would have, the bomb blew up, so that the main force of the flames struck the ceiling of the classroom, the soft tiles of which absorbed most of its heat and power. That portion of the force and fire the ceiling didn’t absorb flared out and down the walls: walls that very few of the kids and teachers in the room were standing near. It blew so that the one person to receive its brunt was the person who set it off—David’s wife, Doris.
Why had the force of the bomb traveled up instead of out? The Wixoms narrate how what appeared to be the only possible answer came to light.
Seven-year-old Katie Walker told her fourteen-year-old brother, Shane, the first family member she saw after running from the explosion, “They saved us. I said a prayer, and they saved us!”
“Who saved you?” Shane asked.
“The angels,” she replied.
Katie saw her mother, Glenna Walker, a few minutes later. “Mommy,” Katie repeated, “the angels saved us!”
Glenna patted her daughter on the head. “Yes, we all have much to be grateful for, dear,” she said, holding her close.
Glenna did not realize that her daughter wanted to be taken literally. Even though Katie’s sister Rachel was being treated for burns at the hospital, Rachel and Katie and Travis had all come through their ordeal alive and Glenna hoped they would soon no longer need to talk about the takeover. The children, however, wanted to talk about it.
Dr. Vern Cox was one of the psychologists brought in to help the town work through the fears and feelings generated by David Young’s attack. Along with other families in Cokeville, Kevin and Glenna joined the group and individual discussions intended to provide this help. At one of these meetings, Katie and Rachel told Dr. Cox that they had tried to talk with their parents about the angels who had saved them. Their brother Travis also had something very serious on his mind. Dr. Cox told their parents what the children had been telling him.
“Why haven’t they been telling us, their own parents?” Glenna wanted to know.
“Have you been listening to them?” he asked her. “Really listening?”
Glenna realized that perhaps they hadn’t. She and Kevin arranged a time when the whole family could talk.
“They were standing there above us,” Katie began. “There was a mother and a father and a lady holding a tiny baby, and a little girl with long hair. There was a family of people. The woman told us the bomb was going off soon, and to listen to our brother. He was going to come over and tell us what to do.”
“She said to be sure we did what he told us,” Rachel added.
“They were all dressed in white, bright like a light bulb but brighter around the face,” Katie told her mother.
“The girl had a long dress,” Rachel nodded, “which covered her feet, and she had light brown hair.”
The two girls spoke quietly but firmly about people who had certainly not been among the hostages. There was no apology or self-consciousness—the people they described seemed as real to them as their own parents, who were listening, attentively now. Rachel remembered something else—that the figures dressed in white standing above them had moved around to another part of the room just before the bomb went off.
Other children saw nothing, but heard distinct directions. “I didn’t see anything—nothing!” said one. “I just heard a voice. It told me to find my little sisters and take them over by the window and keep them there. I did what I was told.”
Child after child told his or her story of what had happened just before the explosion: of beings clothed in white that had descended through the ceiling, given the children specific instructions about where to go, and formed a ring around the bomb, a ring that appears to be the only explicable reason that the blast, diminished as it was, went up toward the ceiling, then down the walls, rather than out, where it would have done much more harm.
Some thirty years after Cokeville, the singular mystery of the event stands as strong as ever. No one has explained it, and no one has robbed it of its terror or magic. It is a story of the world as it really is: a world of evil and good, of things visible and invisible. If it is not proof of angels, it is certainly proof that the world is more than we tend to think it is.