“Don’t try to prove anything.”: Pierre Jovanovic, An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels: A Journalist’s Investigative Report (New York: M. Evans & Company, 1997), 149. The quote is from an interview Jovanovic conducted with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
“I picked one”: Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Harmony Books, 2005), p. 11.
“church again!”: Ibid., p. 13.
“From a certain point”: Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms, trans. Michael Hoffmann, ed. Roberto Calasso (New York: Schocken Books), p. 7, aphorism 5.
“Ten years ago”: Meg Maxwell and Verena Tschudin, Seeing the Invisible: Modern Religious and Other Transcendental Experiences (London: Arkana), pp. 75–76.
“Of Paradise, so late”: John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Oxon: Routledge, 1997), bk. 12, lines 642–50.
“Every angel is terrifying.”: Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2001), p. 5, line 7. 000
“Humankind cannot”: T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets (New York: Mariner Books, 1968), p. 14, lines 42–43.
“For beauty is nothing”: Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2001), p. 5, lines 4–7.
“I was a matron”: Meg Maxwell and Verena Tschudin, Seeing the Invisible, pp. 137–38.
“Excell thought the man”: Hartt and Judene Wixom, The Cokeville Miracle (Springville, UT: Cedar Fort Publishing, 2015), 23. Originally published as When Angels Intervene to Save the Children, this remarkable book came back into print in 2015 to coincide with a film made about the event. (The book was adapted once before, for a 1994 TV movie starring Richard Thomas as David Young). Our quick retelling of the event does not do remote justice to the events of that day, and readers are encouraged not to miss the Wixoms’ book. The couple had a child at Cokeville Elementary that day, and their account is not only extremely well written but, because of the Wixoms’ intimate involvement in what occurred that day, one of the most convincing and moving accounts of angelic intervention ever written.
“After the sudden death”: Meg Maxwell and Verena Tschudin, Seeing the Invisible, pp. 71–72.
“Lying on her bed”: Mark Fox, Spiritual Encounters with Unusual Light Phenomena: Lightforms (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), 45. Fox is citing Cherie Sutherland’s In the Company of Angels: Welcoming Angels into Your Life (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2001), p. 45.
“I remember hearing the doctors”: Pierre Jovanovic, An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels, 309–10. Jovanovic, a French reporter disinclined to believe in or be interested in angels, had his mind changed after an inexplicable force moved him out of the way of a bullet, saving his life. His Inquiry is a smart, funny, endlessly entertaining and entirely believable journey through the world of guardian angels, and easily one of the most valuable contemporary books on the subject of angels, period. Those interested in the kind of story recounted here will find many, many more in the book’s pages.
“One night in October”: Pierre Jovanovic, An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels, p. 109.
“While I’m staring at the instruments”: Rosemary Ellen Guilley, The Encyclopedia of Angels, 2nd ed. (New York: Facts on File/Visionary Living), 216–17. All of the Lindbergh material quoted here came from Guilley’s Encyclopedia, the first edition of which I raided constantly during my tenure at Angels on Earth. Along with Gustav Davidson’s (more academic but also more stuffy) Dictionary of Angels, Guilley’s Encyclopedia is the source for information on all aspects of angels, from the thoughts of the Church Fathers all the way on up to the kaleidoscopic New Age heterodoxies of today.
“I could not feel lonely”: Theodora Ward, Of Men and Angels: A Personal Study of a Persisting Symbol in Western Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 213. If Rosemary Ellen Guilley’s Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive contemporary source for information on angels, Theodora Ward’s book, though published almost fifty years ago, is still probably the best all-around introduction to what angels are or might be, and what they have meant to people down through the centuries. In a world flooded with not-so-great books about angels, it is a shame that this one is currently out of print.
“My dear brothers”: Charles Baudelaire, from the short story “Le Joueur généreux,” first published in France in 1864.
“The Siren Call”: Joe Fisher, The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts (New York: Paraview Press, 2001). For all its darkness and frequent naiveté, The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts remains one of the truly essential books for anyone interested in exploring just how real, and dangerous, the world of spirit communication as practiced by various New Age and other groups these days can be.
“All of us”: Herman Melville, Typee, Omoo, Mardi (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 662.
“Fifteen years ago”: Quoted in Robert Sardello, The Angels (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 23.
“Perhaps all the dragons”: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M. D. Herter Norton, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 52.
“Moments before the bomb went off”: Witness to Miracles: Remembering the Cokeville Elementary School Bombing (Greybull, WY: Pronghorn Press, 2006), p. 109.
“Even though I was only eight”: Ibid., p. 87.