Kinship  With  the  Angels

Martin Cecil  September 30, 1973

Personally I feel a closer kinship with the angels than I do with an ancestry reaching back into the primeval slime. How about you? Whatever the fact may seem to be with respect to human heredity, a potential which transcends the earthy condition is inherently sensed by anyone of integrity. From whence does this assurance come? It certainly is of much more immediate impact than speculation about an amoebic forebear! Would it be less scientific to listen to the voice of this intuition than to trust the laborious processes of human thought tracing the speculative contradictions of circumstantial evidence?

What is man? The sad consequence of senseless chance? The most complex organism and therefore the highest form of life mysteriously evolved out of more elementary states of living matter? Or could the fact of his presence on earth stem from a higher rather than a lower source? How about looking up for the answer instead of down?

What is up? Well, down in this context is toward ancestral yesterdays. It is toward what appear to be earthly derivations. Such a view purports to see a chain of events leading out of the vast chasm of the past and proceeding into the ever receding unknown of the future. The downward view is sustained by the endless acquisition of knowledge about the time-oriented phenomenal world. The upward view, on the contrary, calls to remembrance the eternal nature of the present moment and the higher cause of what now is. That there is such a present cause is proclaimed by one's sense of transcendent potential: “I am now a person akin to the angels! I may not yet have realized all my potential but I inherently know that it is here to be realized.”

So much attention is paid to the appearance of things, to pleasures and pains, to the experience of the past and the expectations of the future — in other words, to what is lower — that the transcendent angel vanishes from view. There ain't no such animal! is the skeptical view. But a person is finally dead inside himself when he has lost consciousness of his own potential of greatness — his sense of kinship with the angels. Is it any wonder that such an one hastens into the dust from whence his only feeling of affinity arises? What desolation! What betrayal of oneself! And yet virtually all human experience constrains toward this violation of integrity. Science teaches it. Believe only what you can see and touch and measure. Here is the real world; here are the true values; look down and you will go up. How ridiculous!

But the angel is present, encompassing all that is of real value in human experience. Such true values cannot in fact be inherited from the past or acquired out of the world. They spring only from a higher source. When a person is the expression of the angel of himself he knows his value and gives value to his world. Because he lives out of what is higher than himself, he engenders transformation in what is lower. This is the creative art of living. Here is happiness. Look to the angel!

The apparent origins of my earthly self enslave me. If this is all that I can be, what hopelessness engulfs me. I am no more than the bauble of capricious chance. Look to the angel! Loud and clear I hear that silent invitation — an irresistible compulsion beyond the call of ancestry and worldly circumstance. Look to the angel!

Who is the angel? And where? Nowhere, insists blind prejudice. Now here, the upward view assures. The angel is now where I am. Therefore am I not the angel? rather than mere human flesh dedicated to this short-lived state of drear mortality.

Man is made a little lower than the angels, that the angels may walk on earth in human form. This angel in this human form. I am the angel! Let this living form proclaim the truth, no longer obedient in hopeless subjugation to decaying dust. I am the angel. I am from above. Whence are you? Are you merely of the earth earthy? Or are you the angel alive on earth in a body of flesh? Shall the heredity of the flesh dictate your apparent worth or lack of it? Or is your real meaning inherent in the angel? Are you from above or are you from below?

If you insist that you are from below your destiny is death. Dust to dust! When you know that you are from above, then you are alive forevermore. Consciousness-endowed flesh bodies, called man, are made a little lower than the angels. Without the angel man is dust. The angel is the life of man. To deny the angel is death. To express the character of the angel is life. What you express you know — death from below; life from above. Whence are you?

© edl