Article June 27, 2011 Issue

Angels for each other

By Alina Bayer

First appeared as a web original on April 27, 2011

“Angels are everywhere; open up your eyes and you’ll see them.” This line from a song (“Angels are everywhere” by the group It’s About Good) floated through my head one afternoon as I was getting off the bus after a long day at work. It certainly didn’t seem like I’d seen any angels that day: I was upset at a request my boss had made of me, as it was clearly someone else’s job, someone in a different department. But I didn’t trust the person who would normally do this job to do it well. I had left work in a huff and planned to go home and talk about how unfair this was to my roommates, looking for sympathy and commiseration.

“Angels are everywhere; open up your heart and you’ll free them.” The next line from that song stopped me short. Where did that come from? I realized that it was probably a more productive line of thinking than the one I had been brooding over— reveling in the “fact” that I had been wronged.

Mary Baker Eddy defines angels in Science and Health as “God’s thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality . . .” (p. 581). I’ve always loved this definition. The popular view of angels with white robes and wings is certainly pretty, but I feel Mrs. Eddy’s definition is not only tangible but practical.