Editorial September 18, 2017 Issue

Can angels lift us above anger?

Tony Lobl

When I was an undergrad, my bedroom looked out onto a cathedral tower topped off by a fifteen-foot statue of an angel. Around midnight the lights illuminating the main body of the cathedral shut down while the winged angel remained floodlit—a heavenly symbol hovering over an increasingly secular campus.

I was part of that growing secularization. Like many students I had turned my back on religion and was investing my hope for a better world in political activism. I went on protest marches and boycotted a professor whose political views I deemed unacceptable. Yet far from satisfying my desire to improve the world, my attitude and actions were fueling an increasing sense of anger in me.

The way ahead looked like more of the same until I caught a glimpse of another possibility when I had an encounter with what, in hindsight, I would describe as an angel. By that I don’t mean I met a living being resembling that winged statue. This was an encounter with a thought, one that fits squarely into a definition of angels I’ve since come to know and love. It says angels are: “God’s thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality, counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 581).