Movie angels are a curious bunch. Take that malicious crew in The Prophecy series, jealous combatants in Legion (2010), or the unhelpful cherubim in Constantine (2006). Then there’s Wim Wenders’ spiritual meditation Wings of Desire (1987), skillfully remade as the romance City of Angels (1998). In both pictures the angelic majority consists of Watchers, the bene ha’elohim of ancient Jewish writings, who stand around, compare notes, and observe. Except for a few that can’t resist mortal women. With angels like these, who needs demons? 

I prefer film angels that seem more interested in serving God than themselves. Even if it’s in a dugout. 

The first Angels in the Outfield (1951) features a candid and often rude angel pursuing the redemption of an equally plainspoken and ill-mannered baseball coach. Disney’s 1994 remake has a team of joyous angels working not to win a championship, but to help an orphan who turns in desperation to God. Consider Field of Dreams (1989). Have ballplayers crossed over from the afterlife? Are they angels? Or both? The answer might seem obvious, but I’m not so sure.

James Kugel, professor emeritus of Hebrew at Harvard and at Bar Ilan University in Israel, suggests that the distinction between God, angels, and divine messengers is altogether blurred. For example, it was common knowledge among ancient Israelites that prior to events described in the Book of Daniel, angels did not eat, drink, or have names. Yet heavenly visitors were offered food and asked to identify themselves when they called on Abraham, Moses, Gideon, Jacob, and Manoah’s wife. Who and what they were was unclear. It is “those moments of confusion that are the mark of divine encounter,” Kugel suggests. God in his mercy seems to give us special vision, a sort of spiritual fog, so we can endure the shock of these experiences. At issue is not the form of God’s manifestation, but as Kugel puts it, that “what God says is quite real.”  

Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel agrees that in quibbling over biblical identities we may miss the point. The Hebrew word usually translated as angel, mal’akh, means simply envoy or messenger. After his famous wrestling match, Jacob did not speak of a man, an angel, a dream, or a vision. “He spoke of God,” Wiesel observes. “From his contest with God, Jacob emerged triumphant but limping; he was never to be the same again.”

It may be that such contrasts lose significance in our interactions with the invisible world. “Religious teaching recognizes the mystery of life,” advises grief expert Edgar Jackson. “The elements of true mystery become more mysterious the more we know of them.” For instance, none of us balks when a mother refers to her dead child as an angel. The modern term “angel baby” is not meant to represent powerful winged cherubim as described in Genesis, Exodus, Ezekiel, and Revelation. Rather the term is one of solace and hope. Children lost to stillbirth or miscarriage are often called angel babies as a way to remember and honor them in anticipation of a future reunion.

I know the feeling.

In 1999, well past midnight, I’m driving on a dark highway toward Raleigh, North Carolina. My daughter dozed off when we left Richmond, Virginia, but now she’s wide awake and bored with our usual CDs. We scan the radio stations. Jess is ten and hopes for the latest hits. Instead, we land on Mark Dinning’s 1959 “Teen Angel.”

I’ll never kiss your lips again, they buried you today.
Teen angel, can you hear me? Teen angel, can you see me?
Are you somewhere up above and am I still your own true love?
Teen angel, teen angel, answer me, please.

Jess gasps and laughs. “Dad, I’m crying!” I smile warmly in the dashboard light. This tune is one of those sentimental ballads so popular in the 1950s. Then she surprises me. “It’s not the song,” Jess says. “I just met her and I already miss her so much.” Now I’m tearing up. I place my hand over both of hers. “I know, baby.”

We spent the day at a museum with my girlfriend, who drove from New York to join us for an ancient Egypt exhibit. This was the first time Jess saw her in person, yet she senses a growing attachment with a woman who was to become my wife and her stepmother. So, our shared tinge of sadness.

Jess died in 2015. That day in Richmond we bought a small onyx pyramid at the gift shop, no more than two inches tall, inlaid with gilt Egyptian hieroglyphs. She kept it for the rest of her life. Today I pause as I’m writing, press the triangular tip gently into my palm, and remember a night that was sad, magical, and timeless for us both. The gesture is tactile. It assures me that Jess existed in this world and our love continues through eternity. 

“My angel, my little angel, you hope to fly away!” keens Friedrich Rückert as his youngest child, three-year-old Luise, lies dying. “Won’t you stay?” When she passes, the grieving father writes that he still feels her with him: “My angel, my little angel, you come to us from above, neither near nor far. I see you, in-between.” Rückert takes comfort in the thought that his daughter is with them in spirit. Reading this as figurative seems presumptuous. It also flies in the face of the lived reality of bereavement, as another poem written after Luise’s death reveals:

Angels hover round us wherever we go.
Angels surround us, where we don’t know.
But in the light, we cannot grasp who
they are or by what names to call them.

Shall we turn away, are they too bright?
Are we too blinded—in whole or in part?
No, we see your joy in the light:
you are known; we call your name.
Smiling, you help us to see and to know:
you hover round us, wherever we go.

Rückert suggests that we seldom notice angels around us—until they are our own. As years go by without Luise, his poems grow more mystic in nature. Hospice care professional J. Todd DuBose writes in the Journal of Religion and Health that grief has an immediate effect on internal perceptions of our bodily experience, and our awareness of the physical and intangible worlds. These may help us cope with loneliness and loss, as with Rückert, who often speaks of experiencing Luise, of her place in heaven, and with their family on earth. 

Experts identify the type of inner vision that Rückert describes as extraordinary experiences that help maintain continuing bonds with the deceased and facilitate acknowledgement of the death. Questions of whether bereaved parents actually see their dead children in mystical encounters or as part of “personal mythologies” are beside the point. Julie Parker (Halifax Community College) writes in the journal of death and dying Omega that such sensations often contribute to a spiritual or religious belief system that fosters healthy grieving as the bereaved adapt to life without a loved one. 

But that’s not what strikes me. If our dead interact with us, are they divine messengers? I’m reminded of the final scenes in The Woman in Black (2012). The titular ghost collects children’s souls. She attempts to trap the young son of a widowed father. Our hero jumps in front of an oncoming train to save the boy. They are both killed, but his sacrifice inspires the spiritual presence of his late wife, the boy’s mother, who leads them to heaven. “All that is in heaven resonates on earth,” writes Rückert. Most of us would agree. As with this scene, the invisible and visible worlds are intertwined. 

Such sacred visitations seem to be gifts that are solidly within Christian theology. We believe that the soul is eternal. We believe that our dead are with God. We believe that God interacts with humanity in myriad ways. We believe that God is love. Might we also believe that in his grace God may allow our dead to commune with us? C. S. Lewis thought so. On March 27, 1951, shortly after Vera Mathews lost her father, Lewis writes a letter of consolation that deserves serious reading:

I feel very strongly (and I am not alone in this) that some great good comes from the dead to the living in the months or weeks after the death. I think I was much helped by my own father after his death: as if our Lord welcomed the newly dead with the gift of some power to bless those they have left behind. . . . Certainly, they often seem just at that time, to be very near us.  

Lewis’s thought is not new in the world. Martin Luther, himself a bereaved father, knew and approved of a contemporary story about one mother who experiences her dead child. “This account is not narrated as a dream, but as an actual event, a real encounter between the grieving mother and her son,” notes historian Anna Linton (King’s College London). And maybe it was.

My daughter Jess dies on Friday, January 16, 2015. The following Monday I’m at a busy department store, leaning on my cart, wandering in a daze. I know nothing of grief; or more accurately, I know all anyone should ever have to learn. 

Suddenly a man is in front of me. He wears an employee uniform. I notice his beard and piercing eyes. “May I help you?” he asks in measured words. I shake my head, stumble on, but look back as I walk away. He’s watching me with gentle compassion. I feel it for the rest of the day.

I never see him in that store again, though I shop there regularly. Months later I ask a shift manager who has been with the chain for many years about her workers. I describe him. “No, we haven’t had anyone like that,” she says kindly. “Lots of mustaches but no beards.”

An angel? Perhaps. Or another person, flawed as I am flawed, whose actions confirm Jesus means it when he says that in helping others we are serving him. “I see some people who will not give up, even when they know all hope is lost,” the angel Michael tells us in Legion. “Some people who realize being lost is so close to being found.” 

Film angels assure us that we are not alone in the dark, suggests linguist Marcelaine Wininger Rovano in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. “Their film relevance is the same as their theological relevance,” Rovano says. “Angels are a reminder that there is more to creation than can be observed with the five senses.” They are a link between earth and heaven, providing guidance in life and comfort in death.

As the priest and poet John O’Donohue wrote in his book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace: 

The dead are not distant or absent. They are alongside us. When we lose someone to death, we lose their physical image and presence, they slip out of visible form into invisible presence. This alteration of form is the reason we cannot see the dead. But because we cannot see them does not mean that they are not there. Transfigured into eternal form, the dead cannot reverse the journey and even for one second re-enter their old form to linger with us a while. Though they cannot reappear, they continue to be near us and part of the healing of grief is the refinement of our hearts whereby we come to sense their loving nearness.

When we ourselves enter the eternal world and come to see our lives on earth in full view, we may be surprised at the immense assistance and support with which our departed loved ones have accompanied every moment of our lives. In their new, transfigured presence their compassion, understanding and love take on a divine depth, enabling them to become secret angels guiding and sheltering the unfolding of our destiny.

This is why I enjoy angel movies. Not for epic struggles and fantasy bluster, but because they offer hope. “We’re always watching,” a voice reminds us at the end of 1994’s Angels in the Outfield. We sense the truth of his promise. If angels are messengers from God, it may be that we meet them every day.