It's hard to see angels, although I've stared at their pictures for hours. Some people can see them without pictures, and they tell interesting tales. Guardian angels are all female, for instance, which didn't surprise me once I found out. A birth angel, recruited from the younger ranks, attends every baby when it appears, while another angel, older but not grim, helps the dying to leave this world without grief or pain.

You can pray to the angels and they will listen, but the best way to call them, I am told, is to laugh. Angels respond to delight, because that is what they're made of. In fact, when people's minds are clouded by anger or hatred, no angel can reach them.

Not all angels have wings -- so the visionaries claim -- but those who do can unfurl a span of golden feathers stretching over the entire world. If you had eyes that could look straight into the sun, you would see an overwhelming angel presiding there; a more serene one smiles out from the face of the moon.

Angels spend their entire lives, which are forever, spinning around the Creator's throne, singing His praise. People with keen ears have listened in. The harmonies of the angelic choir are incredibly complex, they say, but the rhythm is simple. "It's mostly march time," one eavesdropper affirmed. For some reason, that fact is almost the best I have learned so far.

After a while it got lonely hearing about angels you couldn't see for yourself. When an angel-watcher heard that, she was shocked. "Not see?" she said. "But you have an angel in you. Everybody does. I can see it right now, and I thought you could, too." "No," I said sadly, and I asked what it looked like. "Did it look like me?"

"Well, yes and no," the angel-watcher mysterious answered. "It all depends on what you think you are. Your angel is a speck of light perched at the very center of your heart. It is smaller than an atom, but just wait. Once you get close to it, your angel will expand. The closer you come, the more it will grow, until finally, in a burst of light, you will see your angel in its true shape, and at that very instant, you will also see yourself."

So now I am looking for my angel all the time. I sit silently, turning my gaze inward. It wasn't long before I caught a glimpse of something. "Is that you, Angel, holding a candle?" One flicker and it was gone. Yet that was enough to set my heart wildly beating. Next time my angel will be waving a lamp, then holding a torch aloft, then lighting a bonfire.

That's what the angel-watcher promised, and now that I have caught sight of glory, I know enough to believe.