I Believe in Angels

By Cathy Greenfeder

Where did my fondness for angels come from? Partly from my early years at a parochial school where the nuns taught about them and I saw the statues of angels in the church. I had also received pictures of guardian angels on prayer cards and learned the prayer to guardian angels along with the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary”.

As a child inflicted with severe bronchial asthma where each breath took tremendous effort, I held those prayer cards like a beloved teddy bear close to my chest as I lay beneath a pile of blankets inhaling the scent of Vicks vapor rub steamed into the air in the dead of winter.

Once, perhaps in a state of delirium from the medication I’d been given, I imagined my guardian angel standing by my bedpost, glowing and smiling down at me.

“Hello,” I managed to say. She smiled in response, and that somehow filled me with relief and aided my recovery better than the medications given to me at the time.

As a parochial school student you had to be at church every Sunday and holy day of obligation. You had to be with your class, and attendance was taken. Unlike some other children I knew back then, I enjoyed going. I found it comforting. Once  I attended twice. My mother asked, “Why are you going back to church?”

“I forgot to take her?”

“Who?”

“My guardian angel! I forgot to take her. So, I’m going back with her to church.”

“Can’t she fly there?” 

I didn’t laugh because to me the guardian angel and all the angels were real sources of protection and perhaps to a lonely child that I had been then, a companion who’d never leave me. I used to picture my guardian angel, dressed in long white robes and glittering wings, walking with me and guarding me wherever I went in our Manhattan neighborhood.

In the second grade Christmas pageant at my parochial school I played the role of the archangel who announced the birth of Jesus to the Wise Men. It didn’t matter if Gabriel was considered male, I wore a pink costume. My mother made it from a soft, pink fabric. She also made my wings from foil covered wire hangers and used silver tinsel to make my halo.

The fact that my mother who worked hard all day made my costume meant a lot to me, as was being part of the school Christmas pageant.

Later in life, I had experiences which enhanced my belief in the angels.

A near drowning at Davy’s Lake, a man-made lake in New Jersey, when I was about ten was one. I didn’t know how to swim, so I tried to stay close to the shoreline. However, I grew bold and ventured out further. A voice warned me not to step too far out, and when my foot felt a slippery dip in the ground, I managed to move back to the shallows.

As an adult, I remember driving home late one night. I’d been about to change lanes, but I heard a voice telling me to wait. I did. At that moment, a car whose driver was doing well above the speed limit passed me in the lane I would have entered.

There have been other times. Some may call it coincidence. Some may call it intuition. I call it the work of angels.

This inspired my reading and my research, and subsequently my writing of my first published book Angels Among Us, where a psychic artist encounters her guardian angel who saves her from danger and helps her heal from a broken heart.

I’m grateful for my own guardian angels. I believe we might have more than one. I do believe that in these times especially, our angels are here to work with us, to guide us, and to listen to us, and as messengers to intercede on our behalf.

Prayer to Your Guardian Angel

Angel of God, my guardian dear,

to whom God’s love commits me here,

ever this day be at my side,

to light and guard, to rule and guide.

Amen.