Yes, you are about to read more Mickian nonsense about an agnostical atheist who believes angels are real. Heck, I not only believe in angels, I am one.
The word itself comes from Biblical Greek where angelos was the word for messenger. And because the pre-twelfth century translators of the Bible looked at the “el” part and thought of the Hebrew word that meant “God”, they used angel to mean a messenger from God.
Now, I am not being a sacrilegious atheist when I claim to be an angel. That is mainly because I am not technically an atheist. I do believe that a spiritual creative essence informs the universe, but I am actually an agnostic because that means I actually don’t know anything “A” for “not” and “gnostic” for “a know-er of stuff”. I am a teleological idiot because I actually don’t know anything about anything. But I do have the ability to look at evidence, weigh it, and reach a logical conclusion about what is most probably true, and I firmly believe in that only until more evidence comes along. I believe that particular thinking process is what is known as science (at least until better evidence comes along). So, scientifically considering the issue, I stupidly believe I am an angel. I bring possible knowledge from God.
Grandma Beyer used to have a picture like this in sepia tones on her bedroom wall in Mason City. I studied that guardian angel picture for hours as a child.
Thinking about stuff hard enough gives you insight, at least if you don’t over-heat your brain with hard thinking and catch your hair on fire. A lot of stuff has been happening that I have been thinking hard about. Here are some examples.
- Donald Trump is proving to be a really epically bad president.
- There are multiple really epically bad hurricanes forming one after another in the Atlantic.
- The spell-checker on WordPress hates how I spell epically.
- A monster earthquake hit Mexico.
- The Bible has this book in it called Revelations that calls for bad weather and earthquakes and a battle called Armageddon that will bring an end to everything.
- Kim Jong Un is an epically bad leader in North Korea who has nukes.
- It is easy to see where the unavoidable conclusion is headed in angelic “message from God” terms.
- Satan was an angel too.
So, as an angel, here is what I believe God is saying;
“As human beings, we all need to learn to love one another more. Love is the only answer that cures hate.” – God (No, really, he said this to me!)
Seriously. We need to take the weather anomalies as a sign that the time for climate change denial is long over. We need to work together with all people on the planet to lovingly change those things we do that have caused the crisis. We need to lovingly make peace with North Korea. Fighting them will only lead to the Biblical ending of the story coming to pass. I have an anomalous agnostical faith that there is a lot of truth in the Christian Bible. (The spell checker doesn’t like “agnostical” either.) Loving other people besides ourselves and the people who know and love us is the only possible solution to the problems before us.
Of course, I am saying all this angelic crappola tongue-in-cheek because I am, after all, a humorist, and I agnostically don’t know anything at all. But that doesn’t mean I don’t mean what I say.
![LoveOnTheLookOutBouguereau[1]](https://i0.wp.com/catchafallingstarbook.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/loveonthelookoutbouguereau1.jpg?w=172&h=265&ssl=1 "LoveOnTheLookOutBouguereau[1]")
Lynn Johnston’s For Better or Worse is also an old friend. I used to read it in the newspaper practically every day. I watched those kids grow up and have adventures almost as if they were members of my own family. So the mashed potatoes part of the meal is easy to digest too.
Fauns
Fauns originate in Greek mythology as forest spirits, sensual, playful, and infused with the energies of the natural world. They are followers of Pan, the god of the forest. They are hedonistic, seeking sexual gratification from nymphs and human girls, loving wine and feasting. They are not the same things as satyrs, though Roman mythology would come along and squeeze them both into the same mold.
So, why am I, a boy from Iowa of distinctly German ancestry, so fascinated and obsessed by fauns in art and literature?
The answer is both goofy and creepy. I have a faun of my own. He lives with me as an invisible friend. His name is Radasha. He is Harvey to my Elwood. (That’s a Jimmy Stewart movie reference if the twists and turns of my mind confuse you.) Just like the fauns of mythology when confronted with travelers and wanderers, he sometimes helps with guidance and advice, and he sometimes does me mischief with ridicule and wicked tricks.
My theory for why my convoluted psyche has need of invisible companions goes back to the fact that I was sexually assaulted when I was ten. That is why Ra is basically a ten-year-old boy with the legs, tail, and horns of a goat. He is the sexual/sensual part of me that got split off from my inner self by that traumatizing event.
Being a child-victim can do terrible things to a boy. It seriously interfered with my blossoming interest in girls. It turned me from an inventive, out-going leader of the gang into a quiet and somewhat timid introvert. I repressed the memory of the actual event, more of a torture-situation than seduction, so that the real psychological damage of it occurred at the subconscious level. I began to worry that I might be gay. I began to seriously loathe myself and my own body. I went so far as to burn myself on my lower back by lying against the furnace grate in order to repress desires I felt were evil.’
Radasha showed up at my bedroom window late one snowy night when I was about seventeen years old. He began talking at me, making fun of me for being terrified of girls, and encouraging me to risk being naked more. He wanted me to enjoy the idea of sex more and shy away from it less. In some ways, he kept that part of me alive.
Of course, I made myself familiar with the mythological creature Radasha obviously was. I read everything I could about it. I even acquired a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and read it with great fascination even though the prose was dense and archaic. I realized that I wasn’t alone in using fauns as an artistic expression of the repressed sensuality that constantly consumed me. Ra was there to needle me and encourage me, to lead me to learn how to better like myself.
I know by now most readers will have given up on this post already, put off by bizarre self-analysis of my rather atypical case of abnormal psychology. But being naked more is apparently part of faun-therapy. At Ra’s insistence, I am making myself more psychologically and metaphorically naked by revealing these things here in a blog that mostly nobody reads anyway. And naked fauns in my artwork are a definite thing that merits exploration. So if you have actually read this far through this mythological mold spore of an essay, you now know about as much about me as I know about myself. And you will probably do just as I do. You will shake your head and continue to wonder how any one old guy can be quite so weird.
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