An inside joke among some biblical scholars holds that the reason most appearing angels greet humans with the line “Be not afraid” is their frightening appearance. The anthropomorphic renditions of angels in art, basically as winged babies or men and women, go against scriptural descriptions of these heavenly messengers. For instance, they are described in one prophetic vision as having several pairs of wings, feet of fire, faces that are a quarter human and three quarters animal, with eyes all over their body.
Perhaps we need to be jolted time and again by such an image of angels, especially as we age, when their presence becomes peripheral to or speculative in our consciousness, and our picture of them becomes so domesticated that belief in them becomes, in effect, ineffectual.
I raised the subject of guardian angels in a conversation over supper with friends and classmates here in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Looking back, the entry of the celestial into the conversation appears inevitable. We were in a restaurant called Bazar, which serves Middle Eastern food, but which used to be a church many years ago. The proprietors kept the ecclesiastical exterior, so the last thing I beheld before my friend Drasko and I entered was the statue of an angel the color of gold atop the facade.
Meal over, we — Ida from Norway, Faten from Bahrain, Hanna from Germany, Gabriele from Lithuania, Qing from China, Drasko from Montenegro and I — drifted in conversation from one topic to another. By and by, my turn came to convey some news from my home country, and I could not help but speak of the hullabaloo over a sex video that allegedly featured one of our lady senators and her driver, which some members of the Lower House claim would establish her ties to drug syndicates.
It was no comfort; but I learned from my friends that the strategy of blackmailing a prominent person, especially one waging a crusade, is also rather current in the Balkans as well as the Middle East, where human rights activists and anti-corruption crusaders have been, in the midst of their work, threatened by crooks hoping to impede damning exposés with the public spectacularization of whistle blowers’ private affairs.
In one case, in Bahrain, a man found himself the subject of a bedroom video though he did not even possess any recording device. Authorities, in fact, trespassed his dwelling and installed recording equipment there to extract video that would potentially embarrass him.
Last time I checked, sources said the video that supposedly shows the Filipina senator does not feature her but some other lady and that the footage was taken from a random pornographic website. Those who are bent on showing the video in a public hearing to weaponize shaming could well find themselves fighting the Constitution that bids them to be model citizens.
At the very least, they have constituted themselves into textbook examples of resorting to logical fallacies. How a Senate hearing on possible state ineptness in implementing the war against drugs diminishes into the lurid is befuddling at the very least to everyone who is serious in hoping for a government that addresses mass drug addiction without sacrificing the basic right to life.
* * *
In the face of the technological interconnections made possible by the internet, privacy has become a thing of the past. Someone somewhere is always capable of placing anyone under surveillance. Someone somewhere has a record of somebody’s digital footprints.
I manifested that for a long time, there has been no such thing as strict privacy. Everyone has a guardian angel, and the vision of these creatures as eye-ridden underlines the fact that they see us 24/7. And so, in the greater scheme of things, past issues of security, privacy must not be sorely consequential.
Ida countered, however, that guardian angels are not in a state of sordid excitement to broadcast private affairs, such as bedroom scenes. Now, come to think of it, politicians who try to blackmail those who do justice work with potentially character-assassinating material contribute to the false idea of God as a policeman recording our sins to embarrass the work of his hands during the final judgment.
Love keeps no record of wrongs, but it delights in the truth, Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians. Lamentable that we have people who even fabricate records of wrongs in their disdain for the truth.
Their eye-dotted angels are a fountain of tears.