Ordinary people as angels from God

I just finished reading Quarks, Chaos and Christianity. Additionally, I just lost my wife after a four year battle with cancer. In reading Quarks, Chaos and Christianity I noted your thoughts that cancer is a part of the natural order that also produces evolution and is not created specifically by God, a position I find comforting and agree with. You went on to address the issue of suffering, but I felt your analysis was incomplete and am looking to hear your reaction to an additional insight below.

After her cancer diagnosis my wife had trouble sleeping, the word cancer has much power, and it was keeping her awake. She told me that during the night a bright light shown in the back of her eyes and a male voice she had never heard before said "I'm here". Immediately she was able to relax and sleep. She told everyone she knew that God had spoken to her and it gave her great peace. Initially we took the message to mean that everything was going to turn out ok and that the cancer was going to be defeated. But I have come to understand in the time since her death that the message meant something entirely different. During my wife's four year journey with cancer there were many, many seemingly ordinary people who went out of their way to provide food and comfort for her and to our family. The people of our church, her fellow teachers, relatives, neighbors all brought food to the house, visited with her, attended her funeral, and are watching over myself and our daughters. All these seemingly ordinary people have angle [but I think he means "angel" NB] wings under their clothes. For I have come to understand that without suffering there would be no need for angles. If we were all healthy and happy, there would be no need for angles. Yes, suffering is part of the natural order of things, there is a time to celebrate and a time to be sad. But during the time of sadness we are never alone. We are surrounded by seemingly ordinary people with angle wings under their seemingly ordinary clothing. We ourselves also have wings if we acknowledge their presence and choose to unfold them. All these angles are gifts from a loving God who is always with us, who understands the joy and sadness of our journey because He walked it in the person of Jesus, and who sends His angles in our time of need.

This is my additional insight. I know it is not exactly a question, but would love to hear your reaction to this additional insight into suffering.

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John's reply: Thank you for the moving story about your wife. I am sure that here are many angles on what is happening. When we pray for healing, it may come though physical recovery of through the reconciled acceptance of what is happening.

Continuity after death (and Angels/Spirits)

I very much enjoy your work and also your "come-think-with-me" style. My question concerns the continuity of person on a monist understanding of human nature. If I recall you hold the view that we are dual (or more)-aspect beings made of one stuff and you further hold that our continuity at death is possibly vouchsafed by God's remembering of us and ability to reconstitute us (albeit in a "spiritual body") in the new creation. That seems probably the best monist answer I've heard and an elegant one I'd be happy to embrace but how would it be me that was resurrected and not a clone of me God has made? If I destroyed a painting I'd made but then re-made it from memory would it be accurate to say the painting goes on or a duplictate goes on? Since I don't think personhood is simply constituted by the data/ memories I have or about me...how can the "I" survive death on such a view?

Finally---do you think angels / spirits exist?

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NB Response Clearly we can’t know the details of this. But I think that humans are more like musical compositions than paintings (apart from anything else we are dynamic and we are not constituted by material identity since the atoms in our bodies change all the time). If the MS of a composition is lost and the composer writes it down from memory it is the same piece.

Of course a “clone” is not the same person because even if they are identical genetically there is a lot more to personhood.
Surely Angels/Spirits exist. In what form exactly is much harder to say. We discuss this a bit in Questions of Truth.