"They have a thirst for things that are against reason, and they do not want to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it. And so they experience 'miracles' and 'rebirths' and hear the voices of the little angels!"

--Nietzsche

In college, I had daily occasion to pass through a cemetery on the south side of campus on my way to and from classes. I fancied that I knew the persons buried there, invented visages and personalities for them. I respectfully avoided stepping on graves. Over time, I made weak efforts at convincing others that there really were spirits there, spirits that could be seen, particularly at night in the fog.

But nobody was ever convinced. And really, I never believed it in the first place. In short, I was acting like an idiot. Maybe if somebody else attested to seeing the spirits I claimed were there, then they would somehow be real, and proof of an afterlife would have entered my reality.

Still, there are those who believe they have truly come across denizens of non-earthly realms poking into ours. A friend of a friend of mine insists that (while he was Christian) he saw someone who was possessed by demons. Even though he still maintains that this story is true, he no longer believes in Christianity. What I want to know is how you can believe, in all honesty, that you have seen proof of evil spirits beyond the realm of simple human stupidity or malfunction, and not have any faith in an afterlife or in the kinds of concepts contained in Christianity or any other religion that posits an afterlife, preferably composed of contrasting possible fates.

If anything, this alleged demon experience seems exactly the kind of thing people are looking for to validate their own, often vague, beliefs. People frequently invent their own versions of spirituality or spiritual contact, or buy into someone else's, in order to make their own lives more meaningful. The invention doesn't have to have anything to do with reality, even on a subjective level. The person tells him- or herself the same story again and again until they believe it. It is willful deception.

It's like when I was in junior high and had to write an essay on drug abuse. As rhetorical technique, I claimed that my father had been killed by a drunk driver. The core of truth in the story was that my father had been killed in an auto accident. But it had nothing to do with the other driver being drunk. Rather, it had to do with the other driver not paying attention to what he was doing, and to my father driving an AMC Death Trap, I mean Gremlin. At any rate, after committing the words to paper and putting them out into the world, the story of the drunken driver became more real to me. Since it also got me a bit of attention in that particular class, I felt I had to stick with the story. I came to actually believe it. Years later, when I mentioned the drunk driver to one of my brothers, he asked what in the hell I was talking about, corrected me, and the fiction was removed from my version of reality.

Unfortunately, in most cases there is no brother to step in with a dose of objectivity. The current cultural fascination with angels is the most apparent example of the tendency of people to want to validate or give a boost to their banal lives and their spirituality without really having any spiritual commitment whatsoever. Yet, are we to believe those who claim to have contact with angels anymore than we believe hillbillies who allege they are abducted by aliens, or cretins who are visited by the ghosts of famous people? Yet there are plenty of people willing to swallow the bait regardless of who's casting the line. Look at the current crop of "Highway to Heaven" rip-offs on television, and the feel-goodness of the angel-spotting cult of Oprah. These entertainments would be okay if they were viewed as entertainment by their core audiences, rather than as legitimate spiritual experiences.

Still, if you were spiritually strong, you wouldn't be sobbing at some pretend vision of an angel. You'd either grab a dose of reality and accept the fact that you just aren't special enough to warrant such a visit; realize that it was truly a vision from God that necessitates a complete change in your life; or maybe kick that angel's ass, like Jacob did, to prove to God that you were up to any spiritual challenge. If you believe all that angel stuff, angels occupy a higher position in the chain of being than people, but then just like us, they either become servants or become evil. And worse for them, part of their duties could involve protecting our dumb asses. It wouldn't be that surprising if they let several of us slip through the cracks to the netherworld without getting too worked up about it.

But really, if God put an angel to work looking over you, worship/thank God in a way that makes your life more meaningful than a bumper sticker. Don't express your gratitude for angels (particularly when you know you haven't really seen/felt them) in some bogus, 'chicken soup for the soul'-reading way that translates into nothing more than self-congratulations on your shallow, imaginary spiritual achievements. Just because you have a handbag printed with the cherubs from Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" you are not spiritual or deep. Chances are, you're just unoriginal.

When you get down to it, Satan was/is an angel, and probably that's the same story for a lot of "demons." So what are you worshipping Satan's kind for? Looking toward angels as one's main source of spirituality, as opposed to focusing on God, is like aspiring to be a middle manager, rather than the CEO. And as much as your boss might like that you have ambition, but not enough to knock him/her out of his/her job, such near-devotion is probably not going to float with God; and there's a good chance you'll get downsized right out of Heaven.

Copyright © 2000 Jonathan Schildbach All Rights Reserved

Jonathan Schildbach is a PK who lives in Seattle with his wife, Mayumi (who occasionally writes for Japanese pop music magazines), and daughter Jesse (who occasionally writes actual words while stringing together letters beneath her drawings of monsters).