As above, so below: Angels over Venezuela

Our first visions of angels were in the paintings in churches, where we reluctantly went on Sundays with our parents for Mass.

They were all, and still are, blond, with enormous wings, floating a couple of meters above the ground, with colorful halos, accompanying saints and martyrs.

There are still no Black angels, despite the impassioned plea of ​​the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco, despite the struggles of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and so many other heroes of the endless battle against segregation and racism.

There has been a Black President in the United States before there has been a Black angel in a church paint. It must be acknowledged that since Saint Benedict the Moor, there have been many Afro-descendant saints, with the Vatican’s convenient canonization, but not a single Black angel.

Ancient wisdom tells us that angels do not have human form. They were depicted this way because they had to be represented in a way that would be understandable to us back then.

In reality, they are energies that flow through the great hologram of Creation, and they affect you for good or ill (depending on whether it’s the accuser or the guardian angel), but the concept of energy flow is an ancient mystical definition that we can now understand a little thanks to science and technology.

This energy is supposed to surround you, like a halo, like an aura, depending on your vibrational frequency.

If you are in danger, it materializes to divert you from disaster. So, an angel is someone who walks by you, talking on the phone, and says something that is exactly what you needed to hear to make a life-changing decision.

Someone might grab your jacket, stop you from trying to cross the street, and save you from being hit by a car. That’s one way an angel can manifest. Someone stops on the road at midnight and helps you change a tire… Another angel.

The oak barrels where rum is stored in Aragua and Miranda states in Venezuela release alcohol vapors until it reaches the desired age after 8 or 12 years. Up to 30% of the barrel’s original contents evaporate. This vapor is called “the angels’ portion” because it reaches them directly up there. They are little drunken angels, and the place with the most in the world is, of course, Scotland, and secondly, the Aragua and Tuy valleys in Venezuela.

Angels can be very humble beings who, at a certain moment, are infused with angelic energy and begin to perform tasks to save the world.

Thousands of people have been becoming angels since June 24th, here and abroad. They don’t have wings, sometimes, not even the gloves and pickaxe they need to rescue earthquake survivors. But they are there, while other angels gather food and medicine, leaving behind their mundane and selfish lives to create a chain of solidarity that even they themselves never thought they were capable of.

Well, there are angels who do come from heaven. Sometimes they arrive in powerful flying machines, roaring and kicking up dust. They are the new Merkavah, the Celestial Chariot, or the ship of God described in the first book of Ezekiel, where angels came and then took the prophet to see the world from space—quite an alien abduction movie. What do you think inspired Steven Spielberg?

Other angels come in droves, also flying, in airplanes from all corners of the world. There’s a convention of angels in Venezuela, both in heaven and on earth.

How did such a feeling of solidarity awaken? How did a neo-lingua, a new language of inclusion and mutual support, begin to emerge, in which those who try to maintain the old discourse of polarization and division receive that divinely apt Argentine insult: “Why don’t you go to hell?”

Someone will have to explain this collective miracle later, not from a sociological perspective, but from a spiritual one.

There are four-legged angels, furry and with very sensitive snouts. Many are coming these days, from Mexico, Switzerland, the USA, Germany.

70,000 years ago they were wolves, and if they found us alone, they had a small feast. Not exactly a feast, we weren’t a fallen mammoth, but well, let’s say we were a snack.

When we discovered how to light and maintain fire, they learned to fear us. They didn’t dare attack us in the caves where we slept huddled together. They stayed behind the fire. And as always, we left a trail of bones from our ancient grills, so they took advantage of the free food, and even howled to warn us if a saber-toothed tiger was approaching.

We became partners; they helped us track prey, they were our sentinels, and we fed them.

Until evolution made it so that both, human and dog, upon seeing each other, generated oxytocin, a hormone of empathy, and love was born.

They became our pets. Mutual love, true love (“Amor Verdadero”), as Willie Colón´s salsa says.

From wild angels, they became our families. We mourn and bury a pet as if it were a child we’ve lost.

There are four-legged angels searching for trapped people. They are our great trackers, ever since they were wolves.

They are heroes now known to everyone, like Tsunami, the Venezuelan Border Collie who was mistreated and abandoned, and who, after being rescued by Jorge Beens, became a rescue dog. Now Tsunami is viral for his actions in Turkey in 2023, during the Las Tejerías and El Castaño landslides in Aragua, Venezuela. He has saved more than 35 lives in Venezuela, not counting those he has saved abroad.

He’s getting a bit old for the job now; he’s going to retire after nine years of honorable service.

He passes the torch to other four-legged heroes: Blade, Kayra, Dastan, Kepler, Mali, Rambo, and Max.

Yes, you might say: we already know they’re wonderful and heroic dogs, but it’s nothing supernatural!

But have you ever considered that, according to these desert elders from over 2,000 years ago, they can be angels incarnate, alongside other humanized angels, who break the earth with their bare hands to save lives when they bark, signaling, “Someone’s alive here!”?

Becoming an angel isn’t that difficult. It’s not about morbid tourism and taking selfies at disaster sites. Just quietly go, ask what you can do, bring food to our brothers and sisters, bring medicine and food to the pets in Parque del Este, Caracas, where there is a huge shelter now.

And then leave peacefully.

A true angel will never ask to be tagged.