That's all I copied, but it helped me understand about the orders of angels. The angels are also described as circling around the throne of God at the highest. Circling around above at the highest point above the throne of God is the group of angels called the Seraphim. The lowest group of angels, the ones that are the nearest to us on earth, are called "the angels," and they are the direct messengers to us from God. They are described by Dionysius as encircling continuously around the throne of God in tremendous placidity and stability, in a white mist. The various spheres of angels, of course, circle around just in the way they're supposed to be in the Hierarchy-like a ladder, sort of like Jacob's ladder where the top angels are nearest to God and the lowest are nearest to us.

It is somewhat like the in Old Testament of the Jewish Shechinah where, in this complete absorption in the mysteries of the celestial holiness, the Jew forgets everything except the mystery and the tremendous wonder of the throne and the various powers and dominations of powers through which the message of God descends from the throne of God down to us.

Then there is also the idea of God's removal from us, perhaps seven heavens away. With the fall of man, the sin of Adam, He removed himself one heaven away and, each time that man has sinned since the beginning, He has removed himself another heaven away. Now He is seven heavens away from us, and, through this seven, this celestial hierarchy, this must come to us, you see, through various messengers, the lowest being the angel, the direct messenger to us.

This is the reason the feet of the angels are so strong, so beautifully formed, wonderfully poised and almost, oh, just tremendously powerful-looking, tremendously graceful-looking, and yet like our feet, except that no one on earth has feet with quite the same proportion of strength. Angels' feet are so important because they must be very strong to be busy on the divine errands constantly.

The whole matter seemed to be coming into the foreground as a sort of pattern, a pattern of learning, a pattern of assurance, and a pattern of living that I was to follow because everything that had happened has been for good, to help.

I was so busy with all of this research I was doing, so engrossed in it all, that I wasn't surprised when one day, when I was sitting in the library stacks at Hopkins, completely lost in the study of the angels, I suddenly became terrifically hungry for a piece of candy.

I wanted that candy the way I've never wanted a piece of candy before. Two minutes later, Rabbi Martin Kessler from Chambersburg, Pa., came over to me, with a skull cap on his head, and he handed me a bar of candy.

He said, "I just want you to have the candy."

I was so amazed by the fact that all I had to do was to want candy to have it come to me that I thought, "Good heavens, what is this?" I forgot all about the candy, and then I realized that here was a man who could tell me where to find every reference to the angel in the Old Testament. I had all of the records and was following through to get it completely organized: the history of the angel in the Old and New Testaments.

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