Sophy Burnham

Sophy is a spiritual teacher and the bestselling author of A Book of Angels.

If today were my last day on Earth and I could share 500 words of brilliance with the world, here are the important things I'd want to pass along to others...

When I was a young girl, barely in my twenties, my grandmother (then eighty-nine) turned to me. I still remember the look in her haunted eyes: "I'm so afraid of dying," she said. I didn't know what to say. I fled. For years it lay on my conscious that I had let her down. Today, years later, I've had so many personal experiences with angels and spirits and the invisible guardians that watch over us that I wish I had a second chance. I wish I'd said, "It's all right. There is no death. You are eternal - even your personality survives. All you do is shed the physical shell." The fact is, when you come to terms with your own death, everything else in life is easy.

You ask what I'd tell someone if I were lying on my deathbed. It would be this. Angels surround us, darling, guarding, guiding, helping. They come in any form in which they can be received: as dreams and intuition - the tap on the shoulder that says "Go there, not there!" They come as accidents and marvels of coincidence, as animals (especially dogs, it seems), and as other people. You will be walking down the street and hear just the words you need and sometimes YOU will act as an angel to someone else, often inadvertently, perhaps without even knowing you just saved a life or offered someone hope. Moreover, occasionally, rarely, they come in their own radiant and magnificent form, and when you see one you will never forget.

There are three marks of an angel, and everyone agrees on these. First, they come with warmth, safety, light. "Home!" cries your soul, slinging itself toward that divinity. Second they always say the same thing. "Don't be afraid," they say, "We're here." They never say, "Boy, what a mess you've made of things now." And finally, you may not quite believe you saw it (was it your imagination?), but neither can you forget unlike dreams and normal memories, a visitation of an angel doesn't fade with time. How can you learn to see them? You ask. You simply ask: "Show yourself," you say. "I want to see you. Let me know that you are there."

St. Gregory said, "In this visible world, all dispositions are executed through invisible creatures."

Are our senses guided by angelic thought? The important thing to note is that some information transcends our routine levels - analysis, reasoning, logic, which we are taught to trust. Intuition, second sight, these unusual means of receiving information, are not open to us all the time, and some people have more access to these routes than others whether by practice or by accident, they become conduits through which special information may be passed. It is my belief that it has something to do with love.

Listen: I have seen light pouring off the hands and skin of people. This may seem odd, given what I have written of the darkness that sometimes surrounds the human soul. Once I had an operation. I spent two weeks in Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and when I was recovering, I had an epiphany. I have often wondered if it was induced by drugs, but in that case wouldn't everyone have such moments in a hospital?

I saw with extraordinary clarity. I marveled at it: This is the way artists see, I thought, humbled by the miracle of a towel rack, the fold of a sheet. A tree outside the window, the children playing football on the grass reduced me to tears ... One day standing at the window, looking at sky and clouds, I was smitten by the order of the universe. I could hear the singing of the planets, the low, deep roar of stones and rocks. I understood . . . everything - things that today I don't have the language to pose questions about, and the beauty of this order was so sharp that tears coursed down my cheeks. And more extraordinary, when I looked out the window, the leaves and trees and grass were flashing with an inner light. I saw light shining from the skin of people, pouring off the hands and faces both of nurses and of fellow patients. (All but one! One person pacing the corridor for exercise was shrouded in a black, deep cloud: I recoiled, repelled.) The others, however, were haloed, like saints, with light. We were all walking around encased in a body of light. Eckhart Tole speaks of the "pain body." I tell you we are spiritual beings, shining with bodies of light.

Back in Washington in my own garden, I bent in worship at this radiance pouring from the leaves and grass, from every living thing. "Look. Look at the light," I would say. And then realized that others didn't see it flaming off the vines, "like shining from shook foil," as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote.

Since then I have seen this light many times shining off the skin of people. For we are composed of the spark of the Divine and this is why angels crowd round to help and keep us, and why we can see angels, spirits, totems and guides when we open our spiritual eyes in innocence and in awe.

Once my then husband had a stay in Georgetown Hospital. Mr. Johnson, the man in the bed next to his was dying of cancer. Soon after he returned home, my husband was reading in bed. He looked up from his book.

"I think I'll go visit Mr. Johnson today," he said and at that moment a shock of light passed over him, streaming from his skin.

Who was it that said, "Beauty is reality seen with the eyes of love"?

Since then I have been witness many times to the phenomenon - though it is usually glimpsed in a veiled or shadowy way, a passing, fleeting, quickening of light flaring in another person and dying down again.

It is the light of love.

We all are psychic. We all have paranormal and metaphysical experiences. We all have angels loving us, who want more and better for us than we can possibly conceive: a cavalry of angels riding to our aid.

We all have God hidden in the human heart, for we are made of "godness." And when you touch that radiance within yourself, you are afire with unlimited joy, goodness, love. You are shining with inner light, and you have the power to change the world.