I gave a talk recently exploring the idea that God speaks to us. It’s a curious concept. To speak at all, of course, you need to have a body – a throat, vocal chords, lungs – something that (in Christian thought) God doesn’t have.  It’s possible to “hear” a voice through the written word, of course – various scholars (like Ong, and Ruf, for instance) have done fantastic work on how this happens. But one of the reasons that fantastic figures like fairies and angels and aliens appear in stories is precisely to give voice to something.

One of the wierd and wonderful things I love about the Bible is its stories about God speaking – through people, through inanimate things like the burning bush or Gideon’s fleece, through talking donkeys, even. But as often as not biblical tales have Angels as God’s messengers. I love these stories precisely because you can’t reduce them to a neat little pile of facts. What the stories mean is forever in dispute, precisely because we don’t really know what they mean – they kind of tell us the truth, and they also baffle us because they don’t conform to reason.

One person who listened to my talk last week asked, “so do you actually believe in angels, or do you just dismiss them as fantasy?”  I’m reluctant to give too precise an answer to that in a short piece. Instead, let me recommend some of my favourite contemporary uses of angels to articulate mystery.  Check out Salley Vickers’ Miss Garnet’s Angel, which takes Raphael from the book of Tobit, disguises him as a man, and sends him to help Toby and Miss Garnet find their destiny. Or Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, a postmodern fantasy that explores human love and metaphysics. Or this year’s TV movie Skellig, a story of a creaky arthritic angel and two kids. They are fantasies, but they tell us the truth.  If you want to give someone a Christmas Angel, these would be my top choices!