The 3 waves of angels

(3rd of a 4-part series on Angels Are Real)

Creation is still going on. As the physical world changes and evolves, so is Man ­— in his spiritual progress. Author of Angel Answers Andrew Ramer refers to three waves. He said that secret traditions are now being shared openly over the planet. As we confront what seems to be a never-ending series of global disasters, Man has learned better to pray and reflect on spiritual matters, “throwing open his world to them.”

Mother Mary, the Queen of Angels

The whole angel hierarchy is made up of two levels. The first rank of angels relates to our mortal selves. They are the angels of nature, angels of birth to the guardian angels and building angels. The second level of angels relates to our immortal selves namely, the angels of joy, angels of beauty and art to the angels of music.

Reigning over them as the Queen of Angels is the Blessed Mother of God, the Mother of Our Lord Jesus, Mother Mary. She is not just a holy one, but the appointed Queen of Heaven and Earth. As personal intercessor of Our Lord, as her Divine Son’s associate, she sends her angels as messengers and builders to continue God’s work of creation throughout time.

The first wave of angels – from Abraham To Mohammad

We are currently in the rising of the third great wave of angels, according to Ramer. The first was in the biblical times when they only appeared to the occasional prophet or patriarch. When Abraham and his wife, Sara, were past 90, three angels announced that a son would be born to them. Later, when God tested Abraham’s faith, asking him to offer the human sacrifice of Isaac his son, an angel held his hands back to stop him. His grandson Jacob encountered angels in a ladder descending from heaven. Angels accompanied the Jews wandering in the desert after the Exodus.

The New Testament records the numerous angel appearances in the whole life of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who changed the whole course of Man’s history.

When Angel Gabriel dictated the Koran

Angels in medieval times marked the second wave when they came, mostly to saints and seers. While empires and cities were rising and falling, God interceded.

In AD 613, the Archangel Gabriel again played his part in the creation of the religion of Islam by dictating the Koran to the prophet Mohammad. This continued until Mohammad’s death in 632. This great undertaking, together with the prophet’s night flight to Paradise in the company of angels, placed the celestials at the center of yet another worldwide social and religious engineering.

For the next few hundred years, while northern Europe was laboring through the Dark Ages that followed upon the collapse of the Roman Empire, there was a marvelous flowering of science, the arts, and the mystical tradition as the Jewish and Muslim communities came into contact with each other in Spain, North Africa, and Egypt.

It was the Sufis, the mystics of the Islamic world, who put a new emphasis on meeting our invisible friends. They saw the angels as the companions of our hearts, reflections of God as the Beloved. Ibn Arabi, a great Sufi poet, maintained that his major prose work, The Meccan Revelations, had been given to him by the Angel of Inspiration. And, Suhrawadi, author of The Crimson Archangel and The Rustling of Gabriel’s Wing, has left us the richest record of angelic encounters in the Islamic world.

From the Jewish philosophers of that exhilarating time came the primary Kabbalistic text, the Zohar. It contains many methods of consciousness alteration aimed at attaining the mystical states in which it is possible to converse directly with angels. Considering the dangers involved in being accused of heresy, it is not surprising that this information is obscure and often heavily disguised.

The second wave of angels – the appearance to saints, writers and artists

Modern Christian thought about the angelic realm was greatly shaped by the 13th century theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica contained a whole chapter on angels. Beloved saints like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Teresa of Avila have also encountered very special angels.

The great Italian poet Dante Alighieri left us his Divina Comedia, which records a pilgrim’s journey into heavenly domains. In England, poet John Milton attempted to unravel the truth about the fallen angels and their impact on human destiny. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained were his lifetime masterpieces.

Graceful cathedrals rose to the heavens, their surfaces intricately carved with sacred images. The angels surrounding the main portal of the cathedral of Chartres, for example, express to perfection some of the beautiful and protective feelings that humankind had come to associate with the heavenly realms.

The icons are those beautiful jewel-like gesso and tempera masterpieces that are found mostly in Russia and Greek Orthodox churches. The images are painted as direct invocations of saints and angels.

The United States was not to be excluded from angelic intervention. The Mormon Church of the Latter-Day Saints was founded, as we have seen, by Joseph Smith after a visitation by the angel Moroni. In the 1840s and 1850s, there was a rush of spiritual activity in the Shaker communities started by Mother Ann Lee. The Shakers were one of a few religious groups that formed in 18th-century England, which branched off mainstream Protestantism. They are known for their cultural contributions, especially their style of music and furniture, and their model of equality of the sexes, which they institutionalized in their society in the 1780s. People in the Shaker sect were receiving words and seeing visions of the angels, many of which have been preserved and form an important branch of angel wisdom.

The early 20th century in both America and Europe saw a lively rebirth of interest in transcendent matters. Both Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, and the German mystic, Rudolf Steiner, wrote extensively on angels and argued the importance of their place in human affairs. Steiner’s celestial order picked up the original nine angelic orders and then added a tenth evolving group — humanity.

One of the most powerful and moving angelic encounters of the last half century occurred in Hungary between 1943 and 1944. Four artist friends, living in Budapest under the shadow of Nazi invaders, suddenly found the angels speaking through one of them while she was in a light trance. The communications continued for over a year, giving both practical and spiritual counsel on how to deal with the oncoming disasters.

God’s desire to open your angel life

This is Angel Bethelda’s second message to us through author Geoffrey Hodson: “We would light a fire in men’s hearts that you may feel the glow of the same great flame that burns within us; the flame of Divine Life that restores as it consumes. That is the meaning of the angel life, this is the secret of the angel fire; it is the flame which leaps from that immortal spark, our innermost selves.”

Second: “all your faculties will be increased, and all your powers enhanced, till life becomes an ecstasy, till unsuspected beauty reveals itself in everything, till undreamed of capacity for love, for life, for happiness, arises within you.”

Third: “All these and more await you in the future, a future that shall be near or far according to your response to Him and to His angelic hosts. He desires to open a new world to you — new yet older than yourselves — to open to them Kingdoms yet invisible.”

(Part IV – Invocation to Guardian Angels of Home, of Birth, and of Healing)

(For feedback email to precious.soliven@yahoo.com)