A recent post about reports of saints seeing their guardian angels raised the natural question: “What about us ordinary uncanonized Joes?”
Commenter Feng Li favors us with his own personal account of what he believes was an angelic visitation.
I met mine, long before I was a Catholic and didn’t understand at the time. The realization struck me like a thunderbolt years later, when I first encountered the Church’s teaching on guardian angels while reading Gabrielle Amorth’s book for a class.
Related: The Near, Celestial Spirits
I was driving home at night during a rainstorm, and trying to navigate around flash floods. I encountered an impassable section of road and tried to turn around in a driveway, but missed and dropped the back of my truck into the ditch. Between the slope and the wet grass I couldn’t drive out. I had a phone but didn’t know the number of a tow company, so I started walking until I found a house with lights on. I knocked on the door, explained the situation, and asked to borrow her phone book. Once I had a tow on the way, I returned to my truck.
At this point I realized I had also locked the keys inside with the engine running. As I stood there contemplating my stupidity, the walk back to the house to call a locksmith, and the likelihood of one still being open at that hour, I started to panic and then to despair.
From out of the darkness a man approached. He wasn’t nearly so wet as I – my shoes were soaked through. I remember he had long, dark hair and wore a beanie. He asked if I needed help, and I told him my predicament.
He proceeded to take a giant ring of keys off his belt. It looked like it was nearly a foot in diameter. The keys were of all shapes and sizes, and I wondered that I hadn’t noticed them before. The second or third key he tried unlocked my truck.
He offered to call me a tow, but I declined since I already had one coming. I thanked him profusely but was too astonished and overwhelmed to ask for his name or any explanation. He wished me well, walked out of the headlight beam, and vanished into the night.
The tow operator arrived a few minutes later and only charged me for a service call, since he barely had to pull my truck back onto the road. I went home and kept the story to myself for years.
Amorth’s book is about exorcisms, and he mentions the existence of guardian angels only tangentially. When I read that line, years later and before I was received into the Church, I was filled with an immediate and overpowering sense of understanding. I set the book down, dumbfounded, and wept at the realization of just who had come to my aid that night.
Glory to God!
Et in terra pax homninibus bonae voluntatis.
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