Moments before the bomb went off I was standing by the sink, throwing up. I was sick from the smell of gasoline. I put water on my face. David put the string that was attached to the bomb around his wife’s arm and walked to the back of the classroom to use the restroom. While I was standing at the sink I heard a voice say, “Matthew, go over by the window.” I didn’t think much of it, but I heard it again. “Matthew, go over by the window.” Still I ignored the command. And then a third time, I heard the same voice say, “Matthew William! Go over by the window!” When I heard “Matthew William” I knew I was in trouble and I better do what I was told. So I went over to the window. I was only there long enough to sit on the windowsill and look outside for a second and then the bomb went off.
—MATTHEW WILLIAM BUCKLEY, COKEVILLE SURVIVOR, WRITING TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE EVENT
Even though I was only eight at the time I still remember all the little details. Like the line of kids to the bathroom, the smell of gasoline (which was making everyone sick), kids vomiting in the sink, and the angels all around the room. I knew they were angels because they were all white, and brighter than the rest of the room.
—TAREESA COVERT, COKEVILLE SURVIVOR, TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE INCIDENT
IF THERE IS a spiritual problem in our world today, it is not that people don’t have spiritual experiences. They have them all the time—just as much as they did in medieval France, in pre-Conquest America, or in the northwest deserts of aboriginal Australia twenty thousand years ago.
And many of these include angels. In his book The Sacred History, Mark Booth paints the broad picture:
An online survey conducted by the Bible Society and ICM in the UK in 2010 reported that 31 percent believed in angels, 29 percent believed in guardian angels and 5 percent believed they had personally seen or heard an angel.
In America the statistics are much higher. In 2008, Time magazine reported a survey showing that 69 percent of Americans believed in angels, 46 percent believed in guardian angels and 32 percent claimed to have had a direct encounter with an angel.
“Mystical experiences are widespread,” Rodney Stark, codirector of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, said in response to a question about the results of a study similar to the ones cited by Booth above. “This is the taboo subject in American religion. No one studies it, but there is a lot of it out there.”
So the problem is not that we have lost the ability to experience the world beyond our materialistic prejudices, beyond our glass helmets. The problem is that we have lost the ability—and the courage—to “read” these experiences and to develop a truly common, truly across-all-borders way of speaking about them: the kind of language that two men waiting for a plane at an airport would use if they were talking about a football game happening on a screen overhead. These two men know the rules of the game in front of them. They know the players, they know the teams that are behind in the season so far and the teams that are ahead, and most likely they each have a different team that they’re rooting for. When they fall into conversation about the game in front of them, they do so without awkwardness, without stiffness, without having to know anything about each other beyond the fact that each follows the game. They converse with an ease and swiftness that makes it seem as if they’ve known each other all their lives—even though they just started talking a few minutes before and probably won’t see each other ever again.
Why can they do this? Because the game is common territory. One of the men might think one of the teams is better, or that one of the players is particularly likable or despicable. And the other man may disagree completely. It doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s often precisely these differences in opinion that make the conversation interesting.
In times past, the single most important common territory humans shared was their religious beliefs. To understate the matter, this is not the case anymore, and it has torn our world apart. Where is God? Does he exist at all? If he does exist, what sort of a fellow is he? Is he really even a “he” at all? Perhaps he’s a “she” or an “it,” or perhaps none of these pronouns are appropriate to use. Whatever or whoever God is, does he care about us? If he does, then why does he so often have such an odd way of showing it? What happens to us when we die? Will we understand more of God and what he’s all about then, or will we simply cease to exist, and hence cease to understand anything?
We need to be jolted back onto that common field of concern about such matters. We need to return to a state of mind in which the spiritual world is seen to be as real as the ocean, and as full of different environments and different creatures. Recently, I was listening to a brilliant author hold forth on angels, then brush off Milton because, not being a Catholic, he was, in this author’s mind, essentially not a Christian. That, in my opinion, is not the kind of mind-set we need right now. We need a mind-set that is tolerant of other faiths but aware as well that all those faiths, in their different ways and perhaps with greater and lesser degrees of accuracy, address a real place: the world above this one.
Angels are key figures in this return to a general, across-the-faiths respect for the spiritual world, because they are genuine beings that have manifested in genuine ways to sane, ordinary people whose lives have been changed forever by those encounters.
In this book we have been concerned with experiences that transcend philosophical argument, experiences that were so real to the people who lived through them that later, when those people got together to discuss them, no one had the slightest doubt that they had happened. We desperately need to hear about such events today. We have a critical need not for signs and wonders, because we already have them. What we need is the faculty to open our minds and accept them. We need events that demonstrate that the spiritual world is real, that it is populated, and that it is watched over by a God who cares about us.
At this point nothing else—nothing less—will do.
To tackle these issues, we do not need to be afraid of science. Far from it. For at the cutting edge of the disciplines of both science and philosophy today, there lie the beginnings of a whole new style of looking at the world around us: one that exposes the rock-solid physical objects we encounter as not nearly so rock-solid after all, and the strange, hard-to-believe encounters with angelic beings that so many people report as not so nutty and impossible either. Experiences like Tyler’s happen all the time. But they aren’t spoken about, because the model of reality most of us were given in school and throughout our lives cannot accommodate them.
This has happened countless times before in history. Looking the other way is, simply, what humanity does with new experiences. Just a few hundred years ago, scientists in Europe refused to keep or examine meteors that were brought to them by people who had seen them fall out of the sky and strike the earth. Why? Because the scientists knew that rocks don’t fall out of the sky. Just as they “know,” today, that angelic beings cannot exist.
It’s time for us to break our helmets—those helmets that feel, when we are wearing them, that they are not filtering anything out, but which are in fact filtering out a whole other dimension of existence. It’s time to be done with the invisible glass that surrounds us and see the whole world, not just half of it.