fringe elements: angels

“I find it fascinating that even though angels are symbolized or somehow represented almost everywhere we look – for example, their images can be seen in church paintings, our home decor, and even as guardian angel charms or trinkets in our cars – when someone talks about a vision involving an angel or other spiritual figure, it’s somehow considered “fringe.”  From Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms: Who and What You See Before you Die, by David Kessler.

I was struck by that quote recently because of my own angel encounters, three of which occurred before I even became a full-blown “fringe” dweller, back when I thought this human life was all there is and the next stop, if any, would be heaven or a far more likely hell. It also reminded me of a mediumship reading my friend, Brenda, had about three months before her death.

Not long after I met Brenda in April of 2015, she began talking about her special connection with Archangel Michael. I was still at a point in my awakening where the idea of angels was scoff-worthy, though I’d experienced several inexplicable saves in my wilder years, and I believed even then, back in ’75 and ’76, that they were the result of some sort of angelic intervention. I guess it was the Archangel part of her assertion that threw me. Seriously? An Archangel is going to bother with regular folks? Is there even such a thing? It just seemed like a harmless fantasy.

But in that life-changing reading with the wonderful medium, Colleen Smith, guess who’s first up? Michael. That would be Archangel Michael. And next? Mary. You know, mom-of-Jesus Mary. By that March 2018 reading, my understanding of Oneness had progressed,  so I was joyful and delighted for my friend. Brenda had hoped in that reading to hear from her angels and guides rather than loved ones in spirit. I told her to tell Colleen that, but instead she asked in her heart. She told me later that she specifically asked Michael and Mary to come. Her illness had advanced, with newly diagnosed mets to the lungs. Brenda was ready for Big Guidance.

And she got it. She was told that she had come into the Brenda story along with her son so that he could work on a plan specific to this life. When Brenda shared the recording of that reading with me, I experienced wave after wave of chills and shivers. Michael essentially said “we are taking you out of your son’s way so he can get on with what he came here for.”

Brenda’s soul agreement was to be here for her son’s soul growth and experience. She was repeating an old pattern with him — not what they’d planned — and so she was “being set to the side so he could continue on his path.” I knew then that she was going to be leaving us, and I was also deeply comforted by the fact that her soul knew and agreed to this. “Okay you guys. You keep an eye out, and if I end up blocking him again, take me out. I’m good with that.”

If you’ve read here before, you know that I know there is only one of us here. And yet the differentiated aspects of that One, aspects which allow all of us to play, learn, and grow in spirit, appear in different ways. Archangel Michael is one of those; Mary another. I’m one. You too.

I have had a few angel encounters myself, the last one of which was with Brenda two days before her death. At the same moment, on a curvy road outside of Sedona, Brenda and I felt the presence of an angel in the car with us. And thank goodness, because that was one terrifying ride. The chance of our making it back home on the miniscule amount of oxygen she had was nil. And yet we did. Angels.

“I used to think it would be a terrible thing to behold, but I now realize that the angel of death would have to be God’s most tender and understanding ally in order to be sent to us at such a significant, frightening juncture.” Marianne Williamson

In my limited experience, angels have come to me only at “significant, frightening junctures.” They don’t just sashay in the door for a chat, all feathers and halos. Maybe some people experience them that way, but in my life, they’ve been the last resort: Big Guns that have saved me or those I love.

In one wild year when I was 18, I had three life-saving interventions by … Something. At the time, even before I became “fringe,” I thought it must have been a guardian angel. Looking back, knowing what I know now, I’m sure of it.

I grew up looking at an old print of two little kids crossing a bridge while an angel watches over them. Probably most of us did in the ’50s and ’60s. It seemed to be everywhere. Perhaps this ever-present image colored my view of angels, but just looking at it always gave me a sense of security and safety, a certainty of being loved enough be worth protecting. That feeling, at minimum, if not the concept of an angel,  was very real.

Leaving a bar in downtown Houston around 3 a.m. one night, I did something I had never done before and wouldn’t do again for 20 years: I fastened the seatbelt in my shiny new Pacer. Forty-five minutes later, I was at the bottom of a 12′ deep ditch, the engine of my car practically in my lap, the roof open to the sky. Far too many late nights and way too much wine had caused me to miss a detour around road construction, and the Pacer and I dove into a ditch, crashing into a massive dredge.

Instead of shooting through the front windshield to crush my skull against that house-sized hunk of metal, I crawled out of that car with a burn on my neck from the seatbelt. I remember leaving Frank’s Little Hut in Montrose as I’d done a dozen unbelted nights before. I remember pulling that seatbelt around me; doing it and wondering why at the same time. Guided. Always.

Just a week later, a man got in my car outside of a bar, again in downtown Houston, again in the middle of the night and my escape from that violent and terrifying encounter, for reasons too lengthy to detail here, could only have been orchestrated by Something Else working to save my life.

And a few months later, Houston again, 4 a.m., alone in my upstairs apartment on a Friday night, windows open to the cool breeze. A knock at the door startled me awake and made my heart race. I looked through the peephole to see a youngish man, probably late 20s. I asked him what he wanted and heard “My car broke down, can I use your phone?” Having just moved in, I had no phone and I unthinkingly said so. He left. Still in a frightened state, I watched through the peephole, standing there for several minutes. I heard him walk down the stairs beneath my window. I heard him.

And then a sudden, big, internal knowing, a kind of explosion of thought: “GO NOW TO THE BEDROOM!” I shot around the corner and there he was, hanging half in and half out of the window, the curtains billowing as he silently struggled to gain entry. And because of the great big “GO NOW!!” and because of the feeling of presence as I stood at the peephole, I was able to prevent that entry, having the benefit of two feet on the floor to his half-in/half-out effort. Big Warning. Just in time.

I had three saving angel encounters in one year when I was young and reckless and so at risk from my own behavior. Twenty years later, my decidedly not-fringe, not-wild, not-woo-woo, sister flipped her car on a remote country road in Oklahoma and encountered an angel who told her how to get out and assured her that she had time, that the car would not catch fire as she hung upside down, groggy from a blow to the head. Fear not.

She vividly describes that 20-year-old incident as if it just happened. The light. The light of that being ~ the Big Light of love ~ filled the car and emergency response people found her ten minutes later roaming a nearby field, asking about “that man” who saved her, who got her out and took away her fear.

And there have been smaller rescues, though no less important. A couple of years after my husband died and just after our little dog, Bill, left to be with him, my own doggy love, Deaf Betty, escaped our house. I was panicked, as we didn’t live far from the very busy Route 66 in Tulsa. I drove through the neighborhood, top down on my little car, yelling at any and all angels, guides, Mike, mom, daddy. “ALL OF YOU! You listen to me!!! FIND her!!! I cannot take one more loss. Not one. Don’t you dare take her away!!!”

My search was fruitless and my heart was breaking as I looped around one more time past my house, hoping she’d be there. And this time, a man standing in the street talking to my sister and neighbors. He held a white furry creature in his arms, my little love. I knew this guy. His house was six blocks away, across the street from where we used to take the dogs to run. He said he’d “decided” he needed to open his front door and when he did, there was a little white dog sitting on the porch. (Betty, who I call Boo, never sits. Never.) And he recognized her, though it had been years since we’d been at that park.

Coincidence, right? Great luck, good fortune. A blessing. And yet, in a gallery reading ten days later with the excellent medium, Cyndy Green, there was Mike. And he brought it up. Cyndy shared a message of love from him, then from my parents. And just before she moved on, she said “Oh wait! Your husband is back. He’s saying he participated in a rescue this week. He said that the angels made it happen, but he was there and he got to help a little. Was it a dog?” Figure that one out. Coincidence?

The next angel encounter happened on a busy highway east of Albuquerque, pitch black, rush hour. Exhausted and nearly out of gas, my little dog and I got out of the car, me to fill up, her to stretch her legs. I was fumbling around in the blackness of this ratty gas station 20 miles outside of town, trying to make the pump work. There were no lights and it wouldn’t take my card and I was trying to keep Boo from going too far.

Failing all of that, I decided to move to another pump. I opened the car door, pulled on Boo’s leash and it went slack. She’d slipped her harness. At the same instant, there was an enormously tall man standing on the other side of the car door in the darkness and I looked over the door of the Miata to see Boo sprawled flat on the ground, sans harness, perfectly still, as if she were being pressed down.

And then she was in the arms of the huge man. I don’t know how it happened. I know it sounds insane. And I also know that something swelled up in me and expanded out and I was both laughing and crying and the first words out of my mouth were, “My God, you’re an angel.” Declarative. “You are an angel” because I knew. I don’t say things like that. Angels? Good grief.

He handed Boo to me and vanished, leaving my little dog alive and me with that crazy expanded feeling and a sense that what I knew of reality had shifted a little. I still don’t know what to think about that but a year later, as I was directly communicating with my team in spirit and my guardian angel in particular, I asked if I’d ever met up with her before? “Yes.” Where? “Houston. Albuquerque.” Make of that what you will.

When Brenda quit breathing last May, she was almost instantly in communication with the wondrous medium, Suzanne Giesemann. She assured us she hadn’t gone anywhere. She said she was still right there with us, kissing us all on our heads even as I’d said to everyone she was gone. And later? Later she told us, “They came to get me. Michael and Mary. It was them.”

So angels? Yeah. Spectacular beings of light coming when asked? Of course. We are ALL that, so why not? The human aspect is awed and humbled and amazed while the soul smiles and whispers, “hello, old friend.”

It’s Big Comfort to know that while we’re stumbling around here in this life, we are guided and directed by other aspects of the whole who watch out for us, care for us, and then meet us when we leave this world. There are loved ones, our guides, and maybe even some halos and feathers in the mix. They gather us in for a hug when we arrive Home in triumph. “Welcome back! You did well. And truly, dear one, you were never alone.”