Thursday 21 January 2010

e-angels

There's a new Facebook 'app' that seems every bit as pointless as Farmville, Mafia Wars and the rest. I've been sent an 'angel', I've been invited to look at it and I'm being prompted to send it back to a Facebook chum.

I'm not going to do this. Though I see the attraction.

For many years I was a bit of an angel freak. I bought and read just about every angel book you could imagine and a few that you really couldn't make up. 'Dolphins, ETs and Angels' was a particularly wild one. Back in those days, I was heavily boned up on the subject. There wasn't a lot I didn't know about angels. And I still remember a lot of it today.

It's a broad and complicated subject because the very essence of the word has been subverted through the ages. The Christians did a good job of rather unrighteously recruiting angels to their own cause, and Renaissance artists did an even better one of blowing the image up into the archetypal handsome white dude with wings.

The last time I saw one, in the flesh as it were, it was neither a religious event nor a winged deity. It was a rich, glowing orb of indeterminable size and density - and it identified itself by putting on a little show of aerobatics. In my lounge.

With the benefit of 15 or so years hindsight, I am finally beginning to appreciate how lucky I was to have been shown such a phenomenon. So many people have reaped benefit from angelic visitations or communications but, as I'm slowly realising, not many people get to actually see them. Angels dressed in human form are rare enough (seen one of those too), but I got to see the whole lightshow. Something I will never forget, obviously.

I will stop banging on about it now. I am grateful for the experience and I have no doubt it had a great effect on my life at the time. I'll be honest - I really don't remember much about the years that immediately followed that event. It was a strange time for me. But what that incident, and the years of reading books on the subject, hammered home for me is that angels (whatever they are) do like to show themselves in mysterious ways.

Rather than appear as obvious orbs or winged creatures or mysterious strangers who save people from runaway trains, they are much more inclined to make their presence known through metaphor, acts of synchronicity, music, geometric patterns, works of art and frequently very, very clever puns. That sounds like a cop-out but it's not - because they soar above the mundane. If an angel is involved in something you see, hear or feel... by crikey you'll know about it.

Whether they come from within or without and whatever their purpose (and I think the guardian angel concept is a bit old hat to be honest with you - I see them as more like a companion species to us earthly types), when they seek attention, they get it. And having got that attention, they'll have a point to make. And it will be a good one.

So the appearance of that Facebook app, as benign as it may seem, might be pointing towards something a little more special. Let's see.

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