Book Review: It Must Have Been an Angel

Title: It Must Have Been an Angel

Author: Marjorie Lewis Lloyd

Publisher: Pacific Press

Date: 1980

ISBN: 0-8163-0363-0

Length: 144 pages including endnotes

Quote: “We hesitate to speak of angel hands being lifted in our behalf.”

Funny things happen where Seventh-Day Adventists cluster. The Adventists, who like to think of themselves as sober rational people if they do take the Bible almost literally, have noticed this for a long time. Their religious tradition explains all the weird coincidences in their lives. They are taught that we walk among angels and devils—spirit beings created to serve as God’s messengers, sometimes capable of channelling their messages through living creatures, but essentially pure spirits that communicate only thoughts, without the feelings, needs, or ages of bodies.

Maryland’s scenic, historic Sligo Creek Park, which looks strangely familiar to many first-time visitors because it’s where so many images of Heaven or Paradise have been drawn, is also one of the more dangerous places in the United States. Rich celebrities live and walk there. They attract predators. If Adventists believed ghosts could exist, they’d have to imagine that the Sligo Creek is haunted by several, of which the best known recent one would be Chandra Levy.

Walking along the Sligo Creek on the way home from work one night, I was accosted by some young men in a car. It was the early 1980s; the idea of “showing all those little nuns at that nursing school What It’s All About,” “It” meaning the male body, still had some currency at the nearby public college; some boys had attempted to kidnap a girl I knew slightly. I’d refused to be terrorized. So these guys were shouting above the noise of their idling motor to me, I was ignoring them, and up came a dog, a black retriever whose legs were just about as long as mine. I’d seen it, or some dogs that looked like it, while walking with the two smaller retriever-mix dogs from the boardinghouse on weekends, but it had never approached me; at most it might have sniffed at the dog walking with me. Now, though, it shoved its head up under my hand, and “Nice chest” was followed by a soberer “Nice dog,” and the car roared away.

For Seventh-Day Adventists, the fact that I knew more than one ordinary natural dog that looked like that one, and the idea that angels can direct animals to carry out God’s will, are perfectly compatible. So are, say, the fact that another student happened to be a terrible driver trying to steer an old wreck of a student-priced car through ice and snow, and the idea that demonic attacks can add further distractions to a recipe for disaster like that. The natural and the supernatural are more like overlapping dimensions than like mutually exclusive categories.

If you share that idea of the natures of space, time, and spirit beings, you might want to read this collection of some of the Adventists’ all-time favorite angel stories. (Most Adventists prefer not to give air time to demon stories, although people who believe one probably believe the other kind.) Sometimes natural explanations for the events described come to mind; to Adventists that doesn’t rule out the possibility of angelic influence, too.

During Alaska’s 1964 earthquake, their Senator’s wife and children were left scrambling around strange, unstable ground that used to be their home. A stranger dropped a rope to help them scramble up a new cliff, and, since one of the children didn’t have a jacket, wrapped his jacket around the child. Then suddenly they looked for him, and he was nowhere in sight. They never saw him again.

During Kenya’s revolution a teenager didn’t want to join the unchristian Mau Mau. With threats and even blows, the gang forced her to watch her friends’ initiation, when suddenly a voice whispered to the girl and hands helped her crawl out through a hole in a wall. She knew better than to spend much time looking for the owner of the hands, but later she went back to the building and looked for the hole in the wall. From the outside she could find no trace of it.

In Germany, a Christian fleeing from persecution hid behind an outbuilding for two weeks. He had been able to take a loaf of bread along with him, and a hen strayed in from a nearby farmyard and laid an egg where he could get at it, every day. The day the soldiers stopped looking for him, the hen stopped coming, and he also came to the end of the loaf of bread. So he went on his way in peace, feeling encouraged by the combination of minor miracles that had kept him out of prison.

The natural does not exclude the supernatural. Angels, themselves, are not imagined as having bodies we can see. They are, however, thought to be able—sometimes—to influence the behavior of living creatures that have bodies.

In a few of these stories the angels seem to be illusions, perhaps enhanced by the guilty conscience of an enemy intending to attack. People plotting crude, violent acts have confessed to Christian missionaries: “We decided not to attack you. We surrender. We can’t fight all those guards of yours.” “What guards?” The missionaries seemed to have no idea whether converts had volunteered to guard their missions, or the attackers had seen a vision of men who were not physically there.

In more of them the angels seem to be people (or animals) following an impulse to do something that makes it possible for them to help someone else. The impulse, or “message,” is all Adventists believe we normally perceive of the angels. Angels are credited for the otherwise unaccountable impulses that help some of us avoid or overcome danger, for ourselves or for others.

In some Adventists’ recounting of angel stories, as in some included in this book, what appears to be an ordinary person standing beside or in front of someone to offer help, then fading behind or stepping around a corner, “And when I looked, there was no one there, no footprints, and I never saw him again,” is thought to be a visual effect produced directly by an angel, without a human actually being involved.

In many of these stories, however, the angels are credited for the supernatural inspiration that seems to have been necessary to direct or correct the actions of a natural human being. In the final story in this book, a former Christian who had backslidden so far into sin that he’d become a violent criminal, possibly impressed by the courage of a pastor who says his prayers and goes to face the evildoer, suddenly feels compelled to repent of his sins and be a Christian again.

In some of the other Christian traditions from which some of these stories come, people say, “Anyone can ‘be’ the angel who ministers to you. You might even ‘be’ the angel who ministers to someone else.” Adventists, who tend to be offensively zealous about saying things the right way, are quick to say that they don’t believe any part of a human ever can be an angel. Adventists believe the Bible clearly states that angels are not the spirits of departed mortals, though many Adventists believe that one particular angel is assigned to watch over each mortal, and some interpret a verse in the book of Acts as teaching that an individual’s guardian angel might carry news to others about that person. (When Peter knocked at the door of a house where people thought he might be dead, they thought “It is his angel” come to deliver a final message.) Nevertheless, as so often, they find themselves quibbling about the right words for a belief they share with the people with whom they quibble. They would agree that any of us can be inspired by an angel to minister to someone else.

I am not dogmatic about angel lore. The New Testament’s words for spiritual “messenger” and “message” are closely related, easily confused, so you have a verse that clearly describes how Christian teachers should behave “for the sake of the message” being translated as “the woman [teacher] ought to have [the outer signs of) authority on her head, because of the angels,” giving people bizarre ideas about angels being a kind of animal that might try to build their nests in women’s long hair. I don’t know whether St Paul believed that bats do this (mostly, it seems, they don’t), but I’m sure he knew the difference between angels and bats. In most places where English Bibles have “angel” they could have “message,” and even when they describe angels appearing like people or animals, it would make sense to understand the word translated by “angel” as meaning “the one with the message.” So, do angels or devils have any individual personal existence? I don’t know. There are things the human mind is not able to know. Does the Bible give individual names to angels, or are words like mi kha El, "who is like God," gaveri El, "strength of God," and lucifer, "light bearer," merely job descriptions? Who knows?

I do know that, whatever Christians may believe to be “really true” about angels, or whether they are able to accept not knowing the truth about angels…people of faith quite often do experience unaccountable impulses to do things that help one another. Most of this help can be seen as altogether natural, its improbability written off as chance or coincidence. I do believe that, as in the Adventists’ worldview, the natural and the supernatural do not exclude each other, but may coincide.

So, should you buy Mrs. Lloyd’s little book in order to learn how to be or be guided by a an angel to minister to someone else? Of course not. No book and no fellow mortal can teach anyone that. All Mrs. Lloyd seems to have intended her book to do is explain through examples what Adventists believe about angels.

If, on the other hand, after reflecting on these angel stories you sincerely pray for a chance to minister to somebody as an angel, then…who knows.