We use the term “allegedly” a lot and it’s necessary but sometimes cumbersome and so perhaps one will simply say:
There is a fellow, a Christian fellow — a preacher — who says since early childhood he has seen into the supernatural — countless angels and demons, how they interact with us, in everyday circumstances, sees these things all the time, as clearly, he insists, as he sees the physical. He details this in a new book that — it has to be admitted — is rare; it has been a while since we have happened across one like it.
And so Blake W. Healy, of Atlanta, author of The Veil, explains:
“My first memory is seeing an angel. I was two years old and buckled into a car seat in the back of my parents’ minivan. My mother was in the driver’s seat, chatting with the teller at a drive-through bank window. A small cluster of baseball-sized lights was drifting in the air above my mother’s head. The lights swayed back and forth in time with the worship music that played on the radio, drifting like they were caught in an underwater current.”
In church, when people prayed, he (allegedly) saw similar lights — often splendid colors — and angels pouring down vials of precious oil, what we might call grace, an anointing.
But it goes much beyond that. Blake’s testimony and vivid depictions are at many turns as surprising as they are coherent, as credible as they are incredible; insights that for some may provide breakthrough insights, a glimpse into spiritual dynamics most only feel or speculate about (we offer it for discernment).
For angels of different sizes have appeared constantly in his life, says Blake, who runs a general Christian ministry focused on the supernatural and is deeply committed to Jesus. In fact, states this man, the supernatural is more real than the physical. He compares our way of looking at the world to the windshield of a car: As we drive we can focus on what is on the windshield itself — perhaps rain, perhaps glare, perhaps grime and smudges and dirt — or look beyond it to the landscape and wide reality (and beauty) that is beyond and all around.
One such angel — as just an example — was easily ten feet in stature, clad head to foot in brilliant gold armor, with a thick neck and strong muscular hands. “I could spend a great deal of time describing the jewels that adorned every notch and accent of his heavy armor or the massive gold spear that looked like a stick in his hands but like a small tree to me,” he tells us.
Most memorable: the angel’s eyes.
“I only had the courage to look for a moment, but in that moment a weight of glory sunk into my soul so deeply I still feel its heaviness. Those eyes had seen God, and I could feel God in them. The reflected glory was so frighteningly powerful that it made my encounter with a [demonic] beast seem like meeting a puppy in the park.” There is page after page of this.
It is what saints have seen. It is probably what Padre Pio and Saint Francis saw: the supernatural reality that unbeknownst to us dictates the physical. Those whose reality is work and money and house and car and clothes and movies and golf only, what society defines life as being only: their world, in comparison, is a tiny one.
“My second memory is seeing a demon,” explains Blake. “I was standing in my parent’s room, straining to listen to the conversation they were having in the kitchen upstairs. Though I couldn’t understand the muffled words, the unhappy tone made it clear that they were in an argument. I stared upward, hoping it would somehow make their voices come through more clearly. As I looked up, a face morphed out of the ceiling, seeping from the drywall like an over-heavy droplet of water. Its skin was pale with dull feathers except for its dark eyes; it had sharp, pointed teeth and an odd, oblong head. The demon pulled free from the ceiling and drifted toward me, and I saw that everything below its shoulders was no more substantial than smoke. I’ve seen angels, demons, and other spiritual things for as long as I can remember. I see them whenever I have the mind to look, and I see them with my eyes, just as I could see you if you were sitting in front of me.”
Many of the accounts come with profound lessons. It reminds us of a priest we met, Father Mark Bozada, who likewise has the gift of seeing the spiritual beings on a constant basis and also has been able to do so since childhood.
Little demons — afloat in many places — and big demons — principalities, says Healy. One seemed like a dinosaur. There are tiny entities, claims Blake — demons flitting all over that resemble insects, or that take bizarre forms such as that of a large eye with the mosquito like nose and threads for legs, hovering. He claims to have seen the head of a dragon that was sent by occultists who were trying to curse a religious service. He sees “cuts” and other wounds on the faces of those who have been afflicted, and symbols representing their pasts and other personal aspects of their lives — in effect, describes how souls are “read.” “You can focus on what is happening in the physical world, or what is going on in the spirit world,” Healy remarks. Indeed!
For if true the Georgia man sees how demons, often more nettlesome than ferly, affect that physical reality and of course the people who inhabit it.
He sees how they enter when someone says something unkind to another, perhaps in person, or an e-mail, a phone call, in a Facebook comment. He has seen the dark unction, the oil, that such entities spread over those who allow their presence, the octopus-like creature on the head of a scraggly Los Angeles street vendor, in Venice Beach, California, for instance, or a demon whispering discouragement into a woman’s ears, a demon that perched behind her and jabbed her neck, “a sniveling, pathetic looking thing with bony limbs and dead, gray skin” — “almost human in shape but no bigger than a cat, with a noseless face and wet hands.”
Angels and demons everywhere? Isn’t that a bit daunting, even macabre?
It’s like germs, he says: The world is covered in disgusting bacteria and viruses that could infect us and kill us. But the body has natural means of repelling this, when the body is healthy, when it is properly functioning.
The spirit is much the same.
You can’t spray disinfectant everywhere, for fear of germs, but you can strengthen your body’s defense, he says. It is a waste of time to hide. And it is an attraction to demons when we are scared. And so it is that he launches into a very detailed description of what it is he has seen and — allegedly — continues to. While the last quarter of the book bogs a bit into the nature of his worship services, for the most part, one does not want the book to end.
Spirits of poverty. Spirits of anger. Spirits of negativity over whole vicinities. Asomatous entities everywhere.
Their goal: to make us feel insignificant or hopeless.
Yet, all this is as nothing, says Blake, when we realize what God thinks of us. “If you know even a piece of what God thinks about you, then you have the answer to every problem that crosses your path.”
[Next: the various kinds of angels]
[resources: The Veil]