Have you felt an angel's touch?

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

They talk about these things in whispers if they talk about them at all. The act of describing diminishes, trivializes, what they hold dear. "It sounds strange, I know, but it happened. When I was at my lowest, she came to me. I wasn't thinking of her. I wasn't thinking of anything except that I couldn't take it anymore."

And then someone who this woman had loved, who had cared for her as a child, and who'd died a decade before, came and sat beside her. "I didn't see her. Not with my eyes. I felt her with my heart. She was in the room with me."

The visit comforted the woman, gave her strength, renewed her. Imagination, some might call it. Wishful thinking.

Others would say she'd been visited by an angel.

In my growing-up years, angels were a fact of life.

In first grade I learned that prayer and said it every day until I grew too old to believe in angels. But when I believed, their evidence was everywhere.

When we were nine, an angel saved my best friend Rosemary's life. A swing her father made and hung between trees, a swing we played on every day, collapsed, and the huge iron bar from which the swing hung just missed hitting her. If it had, it would have killed her. An angel pushed it away, my mother said. An angel was watching over her. I believed my mother. I believed the nuns when they told stories about angels intervening in peoples' lives. I believed in things I couldn't see.

But I grew older and more dubious. In eighth grade, Sister Philip Julie told the tale of a priest who always set a place at his table for his guardian angel, paused when he opened a door to let his angel go ahead of him, and actually to this angel.

I thought the priest was crazy, the story ridiculous, the whole idea of some invisible being acting as a protector absurd. Angels were tall tales, like Paul Bunyan. They made for interesting stories, or inspired beautiful paintings, but that was all.

Doubt displaced belief. My mother's best friend died and my mother was devastated. For days she walked around the house inconsolable. Then one afternoon, a sparrow flew into the kitchen through a door she'd opened to shake out a dry mop. The bird landed on the kitchen counter and rested there. My mother believed it was a messenger, that the bird in the house meant her friend was somewhere safe.

My mother was even crazier than the priest, I thought. "It was just a bird, Mom," I said, shaking my head. But my mother said it wasn't just a bird, that there are things the heart knows that the eyes cannot see.

That bird became a joke between the two of us. Even after her head injury and coma and years of recuperation, it remained a memory that bound us. "You and your bird," I would kid her, and she would smile and say, "Someday you'll understand."

Five days after she died, a sparrow flew into my bedroom. My children were home from school and they discovered it, perched on a TV, our two cats sitting motionless in front of it. "Come up stairs quick," they yelled and I did. I stood and stared at that bird, looked at the small opening it had squeezed through (it was November and one window was open three inches), then removed a screen from a different window and the bird flew away.

Was it just a bird? Was it just coincidence that a bird flew in a window a bird had never flown in before? "Coincidence is God's way of performing a miracle anonymously," someone once said.

For three years I spoke about this only in whispers and only to friends. I wasn't ever going to write about it. But over Christmas I read a book by Sophy Burnham, "Angel Letters," which is a compilation of whispers like mine, stories told by dozens of other people with similar experiences.

"Scientifically they cannot be seen," Burnham writes in her introduction. "but then neither can a black hole in space. Still, their presence is known, and perhaps the letters in this little volume will serve to remind you of moments when you, too, have felt an angel's touch or heard the whisper of a wing or received a missive invisibly floating past, to say `We're here,' and `Don't forget."'

I have heard the whisper of a wing.