Don’t Mess With an Angel
Benign and beautiful or just downright powerful?
What comes to mind when you think of angels? Perhaps you remember them from childhood as gracious, protecting, beautiful and kind? Or an invisible guardian figure, someone looking out for you? Like a ‘Guardian Angel’?
But this image of gentleness and fluffy swan’s wings, which you long to have wrapped around you, is almost certainly a product of the time following the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Britain. People wanted to realise more primitive, purer values similar to those of an earlier age, as exemplified by King Arthur and his knights. They yearned for a simpler and more beautiful world than the one created by cotton mills, market economics and vast urban living. And it probably means that the image of an angel for you is a very sentimental, romantic one.
“wings were a sign of immense, cosmic power”
Nothing could be further from the truth, and whilst the Bible and Christian history is littered with references to these beings, it is quite astonishing that every culture or faith on earth has some kind of equivalent concept of the angelic ‘host’.
Have you seen the famous pictures and many sculptures of St Mark the Evangelist in places like Venice, Italy? Such a great saint is depicted by the image of a…