I am a Quaker, and I am a psychologist (retired), and a life-long student of people. Having seen great sadness and destruction in my family, and myself getting off to a somewhat risky start as a very young man, I got a grip. Something woke me up when I was roughly 16 years of age, woke me up to a recognition that an education was a needed element in my life and I had done little to acquire one up to that point. I showed up at school; I rarely studied. I got by, but I was going to nowhere that would give me a better life than the chaos of my parents.
Fast forward, I have been married more than 50 years, served as a Conscientious Objector during Viet Nam, achieved a Ph.D., and had a wonderful career spanning more than 40 years. My beginnings would not predict such an outcome. What happened?
In my efforts to find my way, psychology was a big help. I learned a lot being trained as a clinician with an emphasis on diagnostics and group work. These skills and accompanying knowledge were useful to me in my own development. But they were not enough.
Having become a reader and having an epiphanous experience that faith was and would be an important part of my life, I began to read the bible. I have read it from cover to cover several times over several years. I have spent time reflecting on what I have read.
The bible stories answered or amplified something I already knew. I came from somewhere that was beyond myself and beyond my parents and my immediate family. Not just me, but all of us. This journey from somewhere to today has had a lot of shared learning – meaning most of us, or all of us, if we will settle and seek to learn, will find that we have a great deal in common not just with each other but with the bible stories.
Considering learning, I also recognized that some of the learning that humankind has achieved is passed on to us in our DNA. Of course. Consider the highly complex skills that creatures such as bees, birds, beavers, spiders – you name it – the highly complex skills they display – after of course, they have gone to school for years – right? No, of course not. How to fly, how communicate, how to form and maintain a community, how to deal with bad behavior – these kinds of skills are on display in the animal world. We are born with similar skills as well – do we know what they are?
I came to the realization that similar skills are available to us, having been imprinted in our own DNA, our own genetic makeup. However, we are also born with the capacity to be independent to the point of self-destruction. Sadly, many people have been and continue to be. Worse, some of these individuals take others with them. Better and hopeful, many have learned better! And, done better!
We, more than any other creature, are born with a sense of and desire for liberty and freedom. We can reject what the DNA teachings nudge us to consider. And for a time, perhaps in some cases a life-time, we can get away with such rejecting of our nature. But for a price.
We can learn about some of this shared learning by reading the bible. It is a history of human development, community development, hope, despair, great decisions and terrible decisions – all of which we are pretty much capable of making ourselves – to be clear: mistakes and achievements – they have all been done before. It is our choice if we want to look ahead, and to look deeply, to see what we can learn from our ancestors.
I learned that the daily discipline of settling, reading, and listening to the inner voice taught me an enormous amount. I am as convinced as I can be that I would not be happily and well-married for more than 50 years had I not developed this habit. I am confident that I would not have had the professional career I enjoyed had I not developed these habits and practiced them.
So, back to angels. They are in the scripture. A whole lot more is there too. What are these creatures and events? Did they all really happen just as they are described? Maybe, but just as likely, maybe not exactly.
When these stories were recorded, humankind did not have the wealth of knowledge available to describe and develop understandings that we have today, and especially to challenge learning and knowledge in the ways that so many people do today. What was on the horizon then and is today, and in the middle of the community and family too: We are safer and better off if we stick together. What is necessary for us to accomplish safer and better?
Develop a good myth, a story, an explanation, and some practices that will bring “us” into regular contact with that content and contemplate its relevance to us today. Recognize some basic rules that lead to safer and better – consider the ten commandments. Recognize some prayer forms that may help – read the psalms and of course read Jesus’s teachings on how to pray (and you will, as you probably know already, find what is commonly called either “the Lord’s prayer,” or “Our father.”
I came to recognize that what was written in scripture contained wisdom and advice on how to have a good life, how to keep a healthy perspective on the self, on others, and on right and wrong. Scripture provides teaching – and some of it is metaphorical – perhaps that includes the symbolic presence of angels – creatures that are so fine, so other, yet in some ways so like us, that they are not us, they are, well . . . angels.
So, that is how Larry the Quaker comes to think about angels, and tends to have them in his perceptual system such that he sees them from time time. And, I am grateful for that. And I am hopeful that you are too.
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