Angels Present, Working Among Us Today, Best-Selling Author Says
By Carol Baass Sowa 5/11/2007
Today’s Catholic (www.satodayscatholic.com/)
SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Today’s Catholic) – It was 30 degrees below zero, with temperatures expected to dip frighteningly lower by Christmas Eve, and Joan Wester Anderson’s son, Tim, was, against advice, driving home from college in the Midwest to his parents’ home near Chicago, Ill.
Already all major highways in the area had been shut down as a white-out obliterated all landmarks in wind-whipped swirls of snow.
These were the days before cell phones and Anderson was sure that if her son was any place safe, he would have called to ease her fears. Six hours past his scheduled arrival, she began to pray. “I remember thinking for the first time that Tim wasn’t going to be coming home,” she said. “And I remember crying out to God in a way that I never did before: ‘God, God, you’ve got to send someone.’”
Meanwhile, her son and his friend, taking what they had been told was a shortcut through frozen cornfields, sat hopelessly lost in their stalled car, knowing full well they would soon freeze to death, and they began to pray.
Suddenly, the inside of the car was filled with light. Behind them was a tow truck, its headlights shining through the snow. “Need a tow?” asked the bundled up stranger tapping on the car window. He deftly hooked up their car, towing them back to the classmate’s home they had left earlier.
When Tim and his friend stumbled, near frozen, from the car to thank the driver who had saved their lives, they discovered both he and his tow-truck had vanished, leaving no tracks in the snow. It was a while before Tim told his mother about this.
“When it’s something like this, you tend to kind of hold it close to your heart for a while,” she said. “And you replay it.” Looking for a rational explanation, Anderson set out to find the mysterious tow-truck driver, only to learn there was a curfew in force at the time and all area tow-trucks had been under lock and key.
“Finally,” she said, “I had to give up and say, ‘God, if this was an angel, then I want to know more.’” As she shared Tim’s story with others, she began to realize her family was not the only one with an angel story to tell. And so began Joan Wester Anderson’s career as author and lecturer on the subject of angels among us.
Anderson had begun her writing career in 1973 as a means of financing repairs on the “fixer-upper” house she and her husband had purchased for their growing family. Writing had always come easily to Anderson, who frequently dashed off letters to the editor to her hometown paper, The Chicago Tribune, but she had never envisioned earning money this way until her pastor suggested this was where her talents lay and she should pursue writing.
Numerous articles in various publications followed, as well as short stories and books. It was her son’s encounter with one of God’s heavenly messengers, though, that set her on a whole new path, uncovering more and more modern day stories of angelic help in time of need.
Her first angel book, Where Angels Walk: True Stories of Heavenly Visitors, became a New York Times best-seller and would eventually lead to a whole series on the subject, including: Guardian Angels, An Angel to Watch Over Me, In the Arms of Angels and Angels We Have Heard On High; and related books The Power of Miracles, Where Miracles Happen and Where Wonders Prevail.
Actress Loretta Young, after reading her angel books, asked Anderson to write her biography, which became Forever Young, written shortly before Young’s death.
“Angels are with us always,” said Anderson, a devout Catholic and member of St. Edna Parish in Arlington Heights, Ill. “We all have one, but if we’re not welcoming our angel, there might be a reason why we’re not getting a lot of help. It could just be that we’ve forgotten him.”
Sometimes angels appear in human form in answer to a plea for help, she related, sometimes they are seen in the traditional way we think of angels, winged and with flowing robes. “Many times we do not see them,” she said. “They come, they pull us out of traffic, they whisper in our ear.” Some have heard a distinct voice speaking to them while, to others, it is an imperative inner voice, somewhat like intuition.
It was in human form that an angel entered the life of a Vietnam veteran Anderson spoke with. It is harder for men to disclose such experiences, she related, as they are more guarded about displaying emotion. “If I’m interviewing them, I have to take lots of breaks,” she said.
The man told her of being trapped under his car when the jack slipped. Suddenly he saw huge feet approaching and the car was lifted, allowing him to roll free. But when he looked around, there was no one there.
As Anderson chatted with the man, an even more incredible story came out. His experiences during the Vietnam War left him an atheist he explained, as he felt he could no longer believe in a God who would allow such things to happen. Then one day, sitting in a restaurant, a man in a shabby black suit tapped him on the shoulder, saying “God wants to see you in church.” Annoyed and embarrassed, the veteran wondered how the man could know he did not attend church. When he turned around again, the stranger was gone.
After relating the story to his wife, they decided to let their son pick a church at random from the Yellow Pages for them to attend. It turned out to be the only church in the Archdiocese of Detroit, Mich., with a ministry for Vietnam veterans and the group happened to be meeting that Sunday.
“Not many people get a chance to see two angels,” the man told Anderson. “Of course he is definitely a churchgoer now,” she said.
Angels, winged and haloed, have been seen by others, she noted. A man in Manhattan on 9/11 looked up in the billowing smoke and debris above the fallen towers and saw thousands of angels. “And each angel was holding the hand of a person and they were all going up at the same time,” he told Anderson. And they were all laughing and singing.
A woman related a somewhat similar vision the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. Driving toward the city and its rising smoke, she had to stop her car to be sure of what she was seeing – angels protectively encircling the city with their wings.
An Episcopalian priest, who was beginning to feel he had lost his calling and should resign his ministry, thought he was losing his mind one Sunday when he looked up at the start of his homily and beheld angels floating above him in the dome of the church. Feeling he had gone over the edge and should commit himself, he was approached afterwards by an elderly parishioner who commented on his startled look at the beginning of the sermon. The pastor tried to brush it off as “nothing,” but the woman replied, “Oh I think it was something. You saw them too, didn’t you?”
Very young children and those in a similar state of innocence sometimes see and are close to angels, noted Anderson. She related the story of friend whose worries about changing her Down’s syndrome child to a different school were overcome when the boy finally pointed to a picture of an angel in a book as resembling the “yellow man” who played with him in his room at night, and whom the family assumed was an imaginary companion.
“Joey didn’t have a word for shining or sparkling or golden,” the mother said, and the closest thing he could come up with was the name of a color he was familiar with – yellow. She told Anderson, “It was like I was infused with understanding and I realized that God was saying to me: ‘Do you think for one minute that your child was ever alone?’” She knew then that his angel would be at the new school with him and she had no reason to fear for him.
An angel in compelling inner voice form caused a mother, who had left her young children in charge of her absent-minded husband one Saturday, to suddenly dash home from the store and run to a neighbor’s open garage where she discovered her children had accidentally shut themselves up in an old freezer. They were still alive, and the woman later told Anderson she did not know if it was her angel or the children’s angel who guided her to them.
“Angels don’t make a big deal out of their coming,” said Anderson. “They come in, they do what they’re supposed to do and they leave, in the sense that we don’t see them anymore.”
“A lot of times that veil between heaven and earth is very thin,” she added, “and angels can step through it and minister to us.”
Author and lecturer on angels, Joan Wester Anderson, spoke on these heavenly messengers in a presentation on April 17 at the new Villa de San Antonio, a faith-based independent and assisted living Franciscan community here, as part of its grand-opening activities and, later, in a private interview.
To learn more about the author and her books, visit www.joanwanderson.com.
This story was made available to Catholic Online by permission of Today’s Catholic (www.satodayscatholic.com), official newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, Texas.
Photo Caption: TREES BLOOM AROUND ANGEL – Trees shown in bloom around an angel at the historic Glenwood Cemetery in northeast Washington in April 2006. The cemetery, a final resting place for some members of Congress from more than a century ago, was founded in 1854. (CNS)
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