Lisa Miller's Legal Battle Resumes

It's interesting that it was the very week in which an important deadline passed in the RICO suit against her, that Lisa Ann Miller surrendered to US authorities at the embassy in Mangua. And that this even did not register so much as a blip in the national news, formerly obsessed with the case. Not even when she was put on a plane to be rendered to the Miami Dade Detention Center for quarantine as she awaits trial for kidnapping her own daughter--the daughter who prayerfully accompanied her to the Managua airport. It's as if she is still surrounded by cloaking angels. And certainly she is being upheld in fervent prayer.

Invisible Angels

I earlier wrote about a documented characteristic of the appearance of angels: they are so bright, it can be hard to look at them. On the other hand, it's also documented that angels can look quite ordinary. There are examples both in the Bible and from anecdotes of both. In this post, I'll address an interesting quality of incognito angels: it appears they can't be photographed.

I got to thinking about this recently when reading the original version of Dracula by Bram Stoker, which brought the term 'vampire' into colloquial English. Among the characteristics of a vampire described in Dracula (and apparently original to Stoker) was an inability to cast a reflection in a mirror. In other words, the phenomenon of seeing a vampire was not due to the physical reflection of light off its corporeal body, but some independent effect on the eye or visual cortex. Such appears to be the case with all visible angels, whether they be elect or fallen.

I base this on the testimony of a friend of mine, returned from a mission trip to northern Ghana. While there--he reported--during a church service, he spotted a dove in the rafters of the church; something not all that uncommon in Ghana. But when he attempted to snap a photo of it on his digital camera, all he could see in the viewer were the empty rafters. Looking directly, he could see the dove; looking at the camera, he couldn't. He snapped a photo anyways, which he showed us upon his return. It showed the rafters, but where the dove would have been the picture was totally washed out, as if hit by an intense beam of light.

I ran across another apparent example of an angel visible to the eye as an ordinary man, but incapable of being captured in a photograph:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865584511/Unknown-angel-priest-prays-with-19-year-old-at-accident-scene.html?pg=all

The priest's image did not show up in a single one of some 70 photos of the crash site. But it turned out he wasn't actually an angel, after all according to a man who admits to having been the mystery priest:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/12/father-patrick-dowling-angel-priest-_n_3746077.html?1376357440

So be careful about stories like this. I trust my friend's testimony, and saw the washed-out digital photo. But I wonder how many other stories like the 'mystery priest' end up being more than they actually were. Some level of science has been brought to bear on investigating this pheonomenon, but it has been roundly criticized for not being rigourous.

Are Angels always White?

94020 As a White Man, I feel a bit uncomfortable with the idea that I may be a member of some favoured race. I imagine my readers would feel the same. But as I study the topic, it does appear that there is something behind the idea. I shall get to that in a moment, but first let me again dispel the myth that such a thing exists as a White Race.

Whiteness is nothing more than a condition in which an individual lacks the ability to spontaneously produce melanin in sufficient quantities to darken the skin. When the condition is localized, it is considered a disease and referred to as leucoderma or vitiglio. When it is systemic, it is considered a genetic condition. If it's caused by a single defective gene, it's known as albinism. But if it's part and parcel of one's hereditary package, there's really no name for this condition in the English language. African-Americans who suffer from it can, should they chose, "pass as White," as if Whiteness was something one can put on or take off. Whites who suffer from it will turn red in the sun, unless they use liberal amounts of sunscreen. But for some reason, putting on the sunscreen doesn't have any special name for it, such as "passing as coloured"--although this has been successfully done.

So, whiteness is something that can be experienced by any ethnic group. There are light and dark Africans, light and dark Indians, light and dark Asians. There just aren't any light and dark Frisians or Norsemen. These inbred ethnic groups are so genetically depleted that the melanin-producing genes have been totally eliminated from their national genome. Interestingly, Adolph Hitler supposed that this made them and their kind the most highly advanced race--a race to which he himself obviously did not belong. Such a claim, however, has nothing in history or science to back it up. The Whiteness of Norsemen was a major factor in the extinction of the first colonizers of Greenland; unlike the darker Eskimos, who relied on a steady diet of seals, whales, and fish to provide them with the Vitamin D they needed, the uber-white Norse Groenlanders figured they could survive on just what their farms produced (raw milk being a natural source of Vitamin D). When the Little Ice Age wiped out their pasture, and thence their cows, the vitamin D-starved Groenlanders perished, while a whole ocean of fishes lay at their feet. Their Whiteness, combined with their stubborn ethnic pride and unwillingness to 'go native' when out of their element, was their downfall. [but see last Update]

So, physically speaking, having white skin is nothing so special. But what about spiritually speaking? In the Bible, whiteness is almost always a sign of purity--the primary exception being that white skin was associated with the uncleanliness of leprosy. So why should angels manifest the appearance of white skin?

Joshua Milton was the rebel commander over a sector of Monrovia during the First Liberian Civil War. One day, shortly after pulling the heart out of a living child and passing it around in pieces for his boys to eat, he had a Damascus Road experience. Radiating brilliance, a man and woman appeared to him, and his first impression was that of a white man speaking to him in his own Krahn dialect: "My son, why are you living as a slave?" After a conversation with Joshua, the apparition ended, and Joshua was on his way out of the warlord business.

So, why was this African visited by God or an angel in the guise of a White Man? I don't know. Perhaps it was the impression generated by the extreme brilliance that radiated from the manifestation. Perhaps, in another context, angels appear as Black Men. Anyone have any such stories to report?

ETA: According to Joshua at about minute 7 on this video, it was due to the extreme brilliance; he couldn't look at the person speaking to him.

UPDATE AUGUST 2014: I have been informed that Liberians put more stock in a white Bible when used for talismanic purposes.

UPDATE DECEMBER 2016: Someone has submitted an example of a Sudanese giant in the uniform of a Russian communist official appearing and disappearing as would an angel; a man was in a long line to get an official permit, and, realizing he couldn't possibly get through the line in time, suddenly saw a seven foot tall jet-black official beckoning him to the front of the line. When he got there, the official had disappeared, and when he went back to the line after receiving his permit, the people who had been in line with him assured him, as had the officials at the front of the line, that there hadn't been any tall black man; they had just seen him suddenly move to the front of the line while people just moved out of his way. Apparently the angel appeared this way for the specific purposes of:

1) ensuring the believer would realize it must have been an angel, as no other explanation was possible;
2) helping to convince those who heard that story that God is no respecter of persons.

UPDATE AUGUST 2018: This website makes the case that it may have been the availability of cheaper elephant ivory in Europe, combined with feudalism's lack of personal freedom that always exacerbates famines, that brought economic activity in Greenland to an end.

Inspired song writing

94020 The White Man doesn't generally refer to angels in his writing. Being a scientist, he likes things to follow the various laws that have been discovered to rule unchallenged in the material sphere. But he also recognizes another sphere, the immaterial. Angels are those beings that cross the boundary between those two spheres and interact on a material level with our own reality. Thus it is impossible to fully study them from a scientific perspective.

From the perspective of history, however, angels can be studied. History dutifully records WHAT happens, without having to go into the HOW. And history is replete with angelic visitations. In fact, history seems to turn on events of global significance that involved the trans-dimensional missions of angels: Creation; The Fall; The Incarnation; The Birth; The Cross; The Tomb. In a back-handed way, this was the basic premise behind the script of Ghostbusters.

Now that I think of it, I'm sure that it was angels who conveyed the blueprints of the Ark to Noah. It is totally fitting with God's character to have used his own intermediaries to communicate across the boundary between the temporal and the eternal. In fact, when he communicated directly with Moses, it was noted as being out of the ordinary for him to do so.

For over a decade now I've been studying the appearance of angels at one particular pivotal event in history: The Operation Auca Massacre. Details have continued to trickle out since Walter Liefeld took his wife, the former Olive Fleming, back to visit the scene of her first husband's martyrdom. At that point Dawa, their guide and a remote eyewitness to the massacre, mentioned that "chanting foreigners in robes" had appeared above the trees at the time the five missionaries were being killed.

This is where my spine starts to tingle. When Steve Saint returned to live among the people who killed his father, he picked up more information about this angelic visitation. The killers, being farther away than Dawa, only saw illuminations in the sky. But like Dawa, they heard the singing. And even more incredibly, Kimo, one of the killers, was able to identify the very song they heard when Steve brought a film crew down to document God's work among the Aucas since the Massacre. It was titled "Beyond the Gates of Splendor."

The song Kimo recognized was from the sound track of "Beyond the Gates of Splendor," specifically a song composed for the documentary, called "To Every Tribe and Nation."

A song composed in the 21st century, but sung by a choir of angels almost 50 years earlier. A song written under inspiration, and we almost never knew it. A Heavenly Song to welcome five faithful witnesses Home.

You know, I kind of suspect that this wasn't the first time it had been sung.

I'd like to sing it myself someday. I have a feeling that I will.