Rumor of Angels

With the guidance of Tom Cheetham in his remarkable text, After Prophecy, I have been meditating on the role of the angelic realm, the presence of archetypes, and and the face of the Angel in our lives. It is an area not only of personal interest, but since it plays an important part in Yeshua's early teaching, it also constitutes a fundamental dimension which we have lost in contemporary Christianity. Here is my own paraphrase and rendering of one of his powerful passages on this subject.

There is something powerfully transhuman about the cosmic Face of the divine. It is the face of the sublime--the mysterium tremendum--and it is not without danger. In the Islamic tradition, the Names of God fall into two grand categories, the Names of Majesty and the Names of Beauty. The cosmic Face of the Angel (or archetype) is the Face of Majesty. It is not inhuman, as is the demonic, but it is trans-human, and far from the scope of our understanding.

The other Face of the Angel is more anthropomorphic: the Face of Beauty. But it is not the figure of the Angel that is the object of anthropomorphosis--it is us, we are the face of that Angel. At the roots of the Abrahamic faiths is the deep intuition that we are mde in the image of our Lord--that is the rumor of Angels. Only in secular society is it assumed that the relationship runs the other direction--we project God, and that God does not project us. The Angel as archetype is the divine projection and the face of beauty, which ultimately makes an encounter with another person so potentially powerful as to rupture the fabcric of human life (taken from 121).