Forward
I drove a taxi at night
during my last few years of college. Even on the relatively tame streets
of Salt Lake City in the mid 1970s, I became all too familiar with the
faces of those who have been given many names by many writers: the lost
ones, les misérables, the damned. I have never been able to
break the haunting spell those faces cast over my soul. Their
expressions – which ranged from empty to terrified, from lonely to
defeated – remain in my memory like a kaleidoscope of human suffering.
I wrote this book for them – for all of us
because we are all them.
At times we all feel alone and unloved. At
times we all look for meaning in our lives and see nothing. At times we
all search desperately for eternity beyond mortality, and find only the
blackness of death.
But the moment we see an angel, or
genuinely believe a story about
one, those feelings disappear just as darkness vanishes when a bright
light is turned on. Angels tell us – with a certainty that even
near-death experiences cannot – that dying is not the end of us, but
merely a change of venue. When we open our hearts to the reality of
angels, we come face to face with the exciting, exalting realization
that there is something within us that trembles with immortality.
That is not all we learn from angels.
The moment we understand at the
heart level that benevolent, otherworldly beings watch over us, we are
forced to accept the life-changing reality that we are never really
alone, that our lives have meaning, and (most importantly) that we are
loved.
It has been over 20 years since I drove a
taxi. But I continue to see
the despairing faces of the lost ones almost everywhere I go. I want to
grab these people by the shoulders and tell them everything I know and
everything I believe about angels. I know it would help, if they only
believed. But I am too reserved for that, and they would probably think
me crazy.
So I wrote this book. If it chases away a
little darkness in a world
that desperately needs light, it will have been worth the trouble.
Chapter 1
The Quest Begins
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
A few years ago a friend of mine named Paul
told me a story that both
inspired and disturbed me....
It happened in the mid-1980s during an L.D.S.
sacrament meeting.
Although Paul had been raised in a very active Mormon family, he had
fallen away from the church years before. He was only there that day to
support his family. His infant niece was to be blessed.
During the meeting, Paul, who had been
sitting next to his wife,
suddenly left his body and found himself looking down on the
congregation from above. He said he felt a spiritual presence at his
right side – a personage who looked like a bright flame. But he didn’t
see this being distinctly. "There was something between us,"
he recalled. "I can’t describe it. It was like a veil made of all
sorts of layers of gauze. He was on the outside, and I was on the
inside."
The angel spoke without speaking. Paul
felt as if the words were
coming from deep within his spiritual core. "Look!" the angel
commanded, pointing down at the congregation. Paul looked and saw the
people sitting in the pews, as before. He had known many of these people
since childhood. Friends, family members, and old acquaintances were
gathered there for the blessing.
But now he saw something more – something
startling and beautiful:
brilliant bands of white connected the married couples below him, many
of which he knew to have been married in Mormon temples. These were not
fuzzy, hazy bands of energy. They were distinct and solid-looking, and
ran like arches from the heart of one spouse to the heart of the other.
"You will have this," said the angel, and then added,
"The gospel is true."
Paul remembers a feeling of motion, a
sensation that he can only
describe as moving through a sort of tunnel with the radiant presence at
his side. Then, as quickly as it began, he found himself back in his
body sitting next to his wife. "Did you see that?" he asked
her. She hadn’t.
Dazzled and bewildered by the strange event,
Paul – who hadn’t
even believed in angels until then – struggled to understand its
meaning. Why did it happen to him? And why then? But answers didn’t
come. Then, just two days later, he discovered that his wife had been
unfaithful to him for some time, with more than one man. Their marriage
had not been good. Paul was well aware of that. Nevertheless, the
discovery was shattering.
"I’d never had much luck with
relationships even before my
marriage," Paul said. "And there I was facing the reality of a
failed marriage. I really think that if I hadn’t seen what I saw
during that meeting – those bands of white uniting the hearts of
married couples – I don’t think I would have ever tried again after
our divorce."
But he did try again, thanks to the
message he received that pivotal
Sunday at the side of an angel. He met a beautiful, talented woman, and
they are now happily married with three wonderful children.
That was not the end of Paul’s story, however.
His experience with
the angel launched him on a spiritual quest. He began to go to church
again, and plunged into an intense study of Mormon theology, reading
everything he could get his hands on, including many out-of-print and
hard-to-find texts. He did not limit his search to the L.D.S.
theological arena, however. He began pondering some of the world’s
most esoteric spiritual texts from both the Eastern and Western worlds.
Every religion, every mystical school of thought were fair game to him.
He immersed himself in them.
This went on for ten years. Then came a
crisis. "I felt like I
had followed the spirit," Paul told me. "But I came to the
point where my consciousness started to shift, and I got really scared
because I started seeing things differently. I was going through a
spiritual crisis of following the spirit and fearing greatly where it
was leading me. It was so different than anything that I could conceive
of.
"I knew that I had come to the point
where I was going to have
to literally let go of so many things that my life had been built on:
temporal kinds of supports, the world view I had inherited from my
parents and our culture, even a lot of things I’d been taught in
church. I was finding that there was so much more. I was realizing that
there were deeper ramifications and meanings to things than we are
taught in church – meanings that most people just pay lip service to.
I was starting to feel that these things were much more real and
profound than I had ever conceived them to be. And it was frightening
me.
"What I had learned was not leading
me away from the church. It
was taking me deeper. It was a very spiritual time, but very, very
scary. It was a time of having to go on pure faith. But I knew I couldn’t
take it much longer. I literally thought I was going crazy. So I began
to pray with my whole heart.
"I said, ‘Look, I feel like I’ve followed you. I’ve
followed every bit of the spirit, and yet I feel very scared. I feel
like I might be going in the wrong direction. I don’t know what’s
going on. I’m afraid. I wish you were with me.’"
At that moment, Paul felt a distinct
presence at his right side, just
as he had at that sacrament meeting over a decade before. And he heard
the voice, in the same way he heard it before.
It said, "I’ve never left you."
Turning to the presence, Paul’s attention
was drawn down toward the
floor by an intensely bright light. "It looked like a veil was
being lifted from the ground up," he explained. "As it was
raised, I saw two feet, and then the bottom of what looked like a robe.
Everything was brilliantly white. Then the veil started lifting higher,
and I couldn’t handle it. I freaked out. And the instant I did, the
veil dropped and I saw no more.
"I wish I hadn’t been so afraid,"
said Paul, thinking
back. "But at the time it was very startling. It was so real –
more real than anything I had experienced in my life."
To order LOOKING FOR ANGELS, go to: http://www.booklocker.com/bookpages/steveosborne.html
(Copyright 2000 OsborneWriter.com. All Rights Reserved)
