Joan Wester Anderson - Where Angels Walk (25th Anniversary Edition): True Stories of Heavenly Visitors

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2016, 1992 Joan Wester Anderson

All rights reserved.

Originally published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Chosen Books (Old Tappan, NJ, 1986): Excerpt from Angels Watching Over Me by Betty Malz, Copyright 1986 by Fleming H. Revell Co. Reprinted by permission.

Guideposts magazine: The Day We Saw the Angels by Dr. S. Ralph Harlow. Copyright 1970 Guideposts Associates, Inc., Carmel, NY. Reprinted by permission.

Angel in Vietnam by Joan Wester Anderson originally appeared in Angels on Earth magazine and is used by permission of Guideposts. Copyright 2007 by Guideposts. All rights reserved.

All Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.

Sr. Miriam Pollard, OCSO. Neither Be Afraid. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press) pp. 189190. www.Ignatius.com

Cover art credit: Medioimages/Photodisc/Thinkstock.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8294-4471-1

Based on the print edition: 978-0-8294-4470-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949346

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W ho, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels hierarchies? wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in the early years of the twentieth century, as dark forces were laying the groundwork for what would culminate in World War I.

This is a despairing question and arguably one of the most angst-ridden lines of poetry in all of Western literature. But at the same time, for someone like Joan Wester Anderson, Rilkes words might sound a bit, well, comical, akin to the old joke that asks, Whos buried in Grants tomb? The answer, of course, is Grant.

So who, if we cried out, would hear us among the angelic orders? For Anderson the answer is simple: the angels, thats who.

Back in the 1990s, as we inched closer to a new millennium and an unknowable future, angels were all around us, offering guidance and protection. Joan Wester Andersons Where Angels Walk, published in 1992, appealed to the zeitgeist of the moment. Her book, which fits very nicely in the Judeo-Christian traditionangels as Gods messengers, helpers, and warriorsoffered inspiring stories of modern-day encounters with holy, supernatural beings, with each story reassuring us that indeed our prayers were being heard on high.

Where Angels Walk sold well over a million copies and sat on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year. A phenomenal feat. Around the same time, Sophy Burnhams A Book of Angels, positioned for more of a New Age audience, was also a celebrated best seller. Yet, millions and millions of people werent just reading about angels; they were also watching them on the big screen in movies such as City of Angels starring Nicholas Cage; listening to songs such as Angel by Sarah McLachlan; and tuning in every week for the popular TV show Touched by an Angel starring Roma Downey and Della Reese. Even Newsweek and Time featured angels as their cover stories. The underlying message from all these forays into popular consciousness was simple: Do not be afraid. Youre not alone. Someone has your back.

The mark of the new millennium came and went. The world did not end. Y2Kthat computer bug that was going to shut down all technology and plunge us into darknessis looked upon now as a bit of silliness that never amounted to much of anything. In those early days, the twenty-first century was looking pretty good. Here in the West, things seemed, in general, safe and secure. Then the terrorist attacks happened on September 11, 2001, and for a few moments we thought that maybe fate had been running a little late. Thousands of people lost their lives in a series of acts, wars ensued, the economy later busted, and everything seemed to come crashing down around us. The ominous lines of William Butler Yeatss poem The Second Coming seemed terribly prescient: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Where were the angels during all of this? Where were our protectors? If angels were all around us in the 1990s, they seemed to have cut their losses, packed their bags, and headed for warmer climates. Certainly, though, there were stories of rescues and angelic intervention in the 2000s. Anderson recounts a number of them in her most recent book, In the Arms of the Angels. Yet angels generally had faded from our collective consciousness. We werent paying attention to them anymore. Instead, our focus turned to heaven.

In recent years, books such as the bestsellers Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander and Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent have sold in excess of seven million copies combined (and that is a conservative figure). Angels were out, and near-death experiences (NDEs)firsthand accounts of people dying, encountering God, and coming back to lifewere in.

Maybe this wasnt such a bad thing. Angels, as Im sure Anderson would agree, are not ends in themselves, but a way of leading us to God, of reminding us that God is present. In an old Bruce Lee movie, there is a line where the teacher tells a student that the secret to life is like a finger pointing to the moon. As the student stares at the finger, the teacher slaps the boy on the head and says, Dont focus on the finger or you will miss all the heavenly glory. Maybe the angels had become like that finger and needed to stand aside to shift the focus back to what was most important.

Or maybe the rise of technology has caused our consciousness to shift. As more and more of us stop paying attention to the world around us and instead shift our focus to the screen of our smartphones, the more we may be missing the angels around us. Fewer and fewer of us are looking to the sky these days. Instead, were checking Facebook or e-mail and in turn blocking out the realities that surround us every day. Myopia isnt conducive to angelic encounters.

Still, the winds are beginning to shift again, and angels seem to be coming in for a landing. As an author, editor, and publisher, Ive come across at least a dozen book proposals in the past year that center on angels. Recent best-selling books such as Anthony DeStefanos Angels All Around Us and Ptolemy Tompkins and Tyler Beddoess Proof of Angels are helping pave a whole new runway for our heavenly friends. Question: what does this all mean? Answer: that there is an angelic renaissance on the way. And what better way to help usher in that new awareness than to celebrate Where Angels Walk, this classic inspirational work that reaffirms Gods ultimate message of love and abiding presence in our lives.