Those who go searching for angels inevitably convince themselves that they've found them; it's the uneasy visions among the unprepared that announce themselves. In my case, I happened to be sitting on my faux leather couch, dusted in crumbs and stains, in my former apartment that overlooked the Lehigh Valley and the crumbling, rusting steel mill some miles downriver, either reading a novel or watching television, I can't remember. Suddenly, with absolutely no indication this would happen, I was utterly, totally, completely, and fully convinced of the following: the unity of all creation, the benevolence of that reality, the thrumming of a blessed energy beneath the universe— and most of all, I felt a genuine and infinite tenderness toward all of my fellow suffering creatures, an empathy that for a second made pure adrenaline course through my heart, that left my mouth dry and my head dizzy. I felt, for a second, as if I was in the glorious presence of a kind and knowing and wonderful something.
Now, normally I'm rather a shit. Which is why this uncharacteristically moving sense of togetherness with existence still remains so memorable to me. And I'm under no illusions as to the veracity of that experience, that divine "click" that suddenly moved in heart and spirit, soul and mind. No doubt there could be some recourse to material explanation, a kernel of dopamine that got loose in my synapses, some endorphins kicked up for a physiological reason. At that point I was a few months sober, and the reformed among us tribes of dipsomaniacs often speak of a so-called pink cloud, the heady rush of those first few months when you've dried out and you're no longer bathing your nervous system in liquid depressant, so the most basic of normal functions appear as if heaven to you. So maybe it was some random neuron flaring, just a bit of the cognitive flotsam that gets trudged up now and again, more often through chemical inter-vention, but occasionally through the sheer randomness of everything.
All of this could be true-and it strikes me as utterly irrelevant. Because whether that experience was just "in my head" misses the point of what perception is-everything is, of course, mediated through my head. The question is whether it corresponded to anything in the outside world, but when it comes to ecstasy and transcendence that very question strikes me as more of a categorization mistake than as anything that is particularly useful, Barbara Ehrenreich, the great muckraking journalist, writer, and thinker, had a not dissimilar experience when she was a thirteen-year-old girl in California, writing in Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything how she suddenly realized that "it seemed astounding to just be moving forward on my own strength, unim-peded, pulled toward the light." This was no Saul to Damascus moment for Ehrenreich, who was and remained an atheist her whole life, but it was an acknowledgment of an uncanny something. Reflecting on that moment, she writes, "You can and should use logic and reason all you want. But it would be a great mistake to ignore the stray bit of data that doesn't fit into your preconceived theories, that may even confound everything you thought you were sure of."
Because the situation is, whether angels are "real or not," people have long experienced them, and still do. I'm envious, because I would love to see an angel, though I think that I've experienced grace, and that's not necessarily a different thing. Often the word "theophany" is used to describe the divine encounter, the experience of something that is infinite and eternal, both immanent and transcendent, and far above our prosaic reality. The beauty of theophany is that such encounters happen in the real world, for where else would they occur? - Elysium, A Visual History of Angelology, Ed Simon, Introduction - Torward an Angelic Poetics, page 7