What idea is more beguiling than the notion of lightsome spirits, free of time and space and human weakness, hovering between us and all harm? To believe in angels is to allow the universe to be at once mysterious and benign. Even people who refuse to believe in them may long to be proved wrong.
Christmas may not be the time to judge the popularity of angels; this is, even among skeptics, the season when we pay attention. We make them in snowdrifts, hang them on trees, bake them on cookies, play them in pageants. Hillary Rodham Clinton has a gold pin she wears on days she needs help: angel's wings, she explains. She made angels the theme of the White House Christmas tree this year.
But long after the carols fade and the stars dim, the angels will still linger. In the past few years they have lodged in the popular imagination, celestial celebrities trailing clouds of glory as they come. There are angels- only boutiques, angel newsletters, angel seminars, angels on Sonya Live. A TIME poll indicates that most Americans believe in angels. Harvard Divinity School has a course on angels; Boston College has two. Bookstores have had to establish angel sections. In the most celebrated play on Broadway, Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-prize-winning Angels in America, a divine messenger ministers to a man with AIDS. In Publishers Weekly's religious best-seller list, five of the 10 paperback books are about angels.
This rising fascination is more popular than theological, a grass-roots revolution of the spirit in which all sorts of people are finding all sorts of reasons to seek answers about angels for the first time in their lives. Just what is their nature? Why do they appear to some people and not to others? Do people turn into angels when they die? What role do they play in heaven and on earth? While the questions have the press of novelty, they are as old as civilization, for the idea of angels has hovered about us for ages.
Glancing around the gift shops, one might imagine that their role is purely decorative. Holiday angels are luscious creatures, plump and dimpled, all ruffled and improvised. In their tame placidity they bear no relation to the fearsome creatures in the Bible and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens. Jehovah's angels are powerful creatures; in Genesis they guard the east gates of Eden with flashing swords; in Ezekiel they overpower the prophet with awesome visions, four-headed, multiwinged and many eyed; in Revelation they do battle with a dragon. Milton describes the "flaming Seraph, fearless, though alone, encompassed round with foes." And Rilke wrote, "If the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars took even one step down toward us, our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death." Every angel, he declared, "is terrifying."