Descent Of Angels Quotes

Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.

You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell.

He pointed at Brother Jeremiah, who had come to a halt in front of a statue just slightly taller than he was, its base overgrown with moss. The statue was of an angel. The marble of the statue was so smooth it was almost translucent. The face of the angel was fierce and beautiful and sad. In long white hands the angel held a cup, its rim studded with marble jewels. Something about the statue tickled Clary’s memory with an uneasy familiarity. There was a date inscribed on the base, 1234, and words inscribed around it: NEPHILIM: FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI. “Is that meant to be the Mortal Cup?” she asked. Jace nodded. “And that’s the motto of the Nephilim—the Shadowhunters—there on the base.” “What does it mean?” Jace’s grin was a white flash in the darkness. “It means ‘Shadowhunters: Looking Better in Black Than the Widows of our Enemies Since 1234.’” “Jace—” It means, said Jeremiah, The descent into Hell is easy.

Whoever would rise, must first descend, for only then can the bottommost rise to the top.

Removing his cloak to cover her, Leviathan leaned down, brushing his lips against her cold brow. "Inna lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji'oon," he said under his breath. "Go with the angels, love.

the thirteenth-century mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, reject orthodoxy of any kind: I hold to no religion or creed, am neither Eastern nor Western, Muslim or infidel, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew or Gentile. I come from neither land nor sea, am not related to those above or below, was not born nearby or far away, do not live either in Paradise or on this Earth, claim descent not from Adam and Eve or the Angels above. I transcend body and soul. My home is beyond place and name. It is with the beloved, in a space beyond space.

But mostly we are made of a heavier stuff, the slow descent of breast, foot-arches flattening towards earth, the hundred ways the body longs for home.

When a loving person dies, God sends angels to escort them on their journey to heaven. Angels are the messengers of God. They could be relatives or friends, but they will be exactly the right persons who represent God’s love to the individual. The persons you long for, who have gone to heaven before you, will be waiting for you when you die. They will be ready to comfort you and escort you to heaven. They will take you from the reality of this physical universe and transport you to a new reality where you get your first introduction to the wonder and power of God. There are as many entry points into heaven as there are individuals. Each person is escorted toward heaven according to his or her life, culture, and spiritual level. One person may be in a beautiful field, another may be in a magnificent castle, another in a setting similar to their grandparents’ home. God and the angels, for the specific comfort and beginning edification of that person, individually create each setting. It is difficult for us to understand and believe how much God cares about and respects our individuality. The angel guardians begin the process of explaining to the person that they have left the world and are beginning life. Everything behind was preparation for real life. What we call death is actually being born into a new life beyond our imagination. We will grow and be transformed. We will meet the personification of God, and eventually we will come before the very presence of God.

You have crossed a line, but it does not change who you are. Don’t forget that. A man may be dressed up in all manner of fancy titles, but he must not let it change him or else ego, pride and ambition will be his undoing. No matter what grand title is bestowed upon you, to thine own self be true. Do you understand?

I wanted to listen to “Huapango de Moncayo,” a traditional Mexican song that I associate with the pain and happiness of being Mexican. The song picks up slowly; then the trumpets blare and make you feel like the angel perched on a Paseo de la Reforma roundabout—the Angel of Independence—stretching her wings to the heavens.

Black Rook in Rainy Weather On the stiff twig up there Hunches a wet black rook Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain. I do not expect a miracle Or an accident To set the sight on fire In my eye, nor seek Any more in the desultory weather some design, But let spotted leaves fall as they fall, Without ceremony, or portent. Although, I admit, I desire, Occasionally, some backtalk From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain; A certain minor light may still Lean incandescent Out of the kitchen table or chair As if a celestial burning took Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then -- Thus hallowing an interval Otherwise inconsequent By bestowing largesse, honor, One might say love. At any rate, I now walk Wary (for it could happen Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical, Yet politic; ignorant Of whatever angel may choose to flare Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook Ordering its black feathers can so shine As to seize my senses, haul My eyelids up, and grant A brief respite from fear Of total neutrality. With luck, Trekking stubborn through this season Of fatigue, I shall Patch together a content Of sorts. Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.

In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon, soon to be blotted out. That is a consoling thought. Meanwhile we are surrounded by strange invisible entities, possibly your angels." "I hope so." "Ah, you think they are good, they cannot be good, there is no good, the tendency to evil is overwhelming. One has only to think of the horrors of sex, its violence, its cruelty, its filthy vulgarity, its descent into bestial degradation. You had better go and dream in your monastery." "Would you come and visit me there?" "Of course not. I do not visit. Only, unfortunately, am sometimes visited." "You don't want to discuss — you know — what happened? My priest said — " "No." "I care about how you are, I love you." "You still fail to realise how this sort of talk sickens me. Now please go. This will do for a welcome home scene. Tell them not to come. I desire to be left alone.

I opened the window to let some fresh air into the room and was surprised to see that the rain was not just falling, but that it formed an actual wall of water, as if the whole sky were falling. While I was staring at the strange phenomenon, the form of an angel began to appear before me… It was Matariel, the Angel of Rain, whom I had not seen since my descent and who on this occasion appeared in a shiny, blue-grey form. She was only an arm’s length away and stared straight at me. She looked like a young woman floating on enormous wings -not a single drop of rain touched her. The smell of the cool rain swept the room as Matariel began talking to me. She never once moved her lips, but her every word was clearly audible in my head.

From this one act, many other laws were passed to make life difficult for the Chinese who were here - even if they'd been born in the United States and therefore were citizens. In our state of California, Chinese down to a quarter couldn't marry a white person. (Anti-miscegenation laws targeted Chinese in twenty-eight states. Here in California, the law was overturned in 1948, but people of Chinese descent in some other states had to wait until 1967 to legally marry a white person.) Chinese - also down to a quarter - couldn't own property in California until 1948. And instead of building a wall, the government built an immigration station on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. Its purpose was to keep all Chinese immigrants out. Despite all that, here we are.

What explanation does Ibn Arabi give for these phenomena ? A first explanation invokes the hierarchical planes of being, the Hadarat, or "Presences." There are five of these Presences, namely, the five Descents ( tanazzulat); these are determina- tions or conditions of the divine Ipseity in the forms of His Names; they act on the receptacles which undergo their influx and manifest them. The first Hadra is the theophany ( tajalli) of the Essence ( dhat) in the eternal latent hexeities which are objects, the correlata of the Divine Names. This is the world of Absolute Mystery ( alam al-ghayb al-mutlaq, Hadrat al-Dhat). The second and the third Hadarat are respectively the angelic world of determinations or individuations constituting the Spirits ( taayyunatt ruhiya ) and the world of individuations constituting the Souls ( taayyunaatt nafsiya). The fourth Hadra is the world of Idea-Images ( alam al-mithal), typical Forms, individuations having figure and body, but in the immaterial state of "subtile matter. " The fifth Hadra is the sensible and visible world (alam al-shahada ), of dense material bodies. By and large, with minor variations, this schema is constant in our authors.19

Even as the feminine principle was venerated for its fertile, life-giving properties, there are also many examples of Goddesses who embodied the entire life process: birth, life, death, and regeneration. This is important because it can be tempting to romanticise the Goddess as a sort of angelic Fairy Godmother or abundant Good Mother. The feminine principle is more complex and more powerful than that. There are many stories from mythology that tell of the different faces of the Goddess. One such myth tells of the ancient Sumerian goddess who “outweighed, overshadowed, and outlasted them all . . .Inanna, Queen of Heaven.”[xxvi] This story originated in ancient Mesopotamia, five or six thousand years ago. In the myth, Inanna, who rules as queen over the upper world (birth and life), decides to visit Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld (death and transformation). As Inanna descends into her sister’s realm, she is stripped of all the symbols of her upper world sovereignty, so that she comes before Ereshkigal naked and bowed low. Her enforced stay in the Underworld and the return after three days predates the Christian story by thousands of years. It is one of the first stories of ritual descent from the realm of life to the realm of death and the return to life after a time of incubation in the Underworld. This is also the theme of most ancient initiation rituals like the Orphic mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, and of much of the Egyptian sacred teachings. At the time when the story of Inanna’s journey first appeared, the increasingly male dominated Sumerian culture was separating from earlier matrilineal forms. Before the descent myth, another story tells how Inanna, in order to rule, had to take power from the God, Enki, assuming his symbols of sovereignty as her own. Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld, represents the archaic feminine, the dark mysteries of the older religion which had been sent underground. The descent story can, therefore, be understood as Inanna balancing her heroic victories in the upper (masculine) world by reconnecting with the rhythms and cycles of the under (feminine) world. Based on clinical experience, one analyst called this a “pattern of a woman’s passage from cultural adaptation to an encounter with her essential nature”.

Did it ever occur to you,” Kai said, “how overblown that sounds? Final descent. Poets take a final descent into the hells. Emperors have a final descent from the throne before someone chops off their heads. We’re about to land, which we will presumably survive, to descend again.

Upward through all the ages, with never any descent, Man pursues still the glorious march which shall eventuate in making him one with the Father—more than man finite, Man infinite! Angelic! ~ Phylos the Thibetan

Sometimes the only way to love something is to set it free.

However, to arrive at a place of contemplation requires that one practice ways of reading that also align well with the senses of a text. You cannot simply become a contemplative without doing some work. A twelfth-century Carthusian monk named Guigo II (his name literally means “Guy #2”) imagines contemplation as the top run of a ladder with three preceding rungs: lectio, the reading of the Word; then meditatio, the interpretation of the meaning; and oratio, prayer. By these three steps we ascend toward contemplation. Guigo’s ladder is drawn from Jacob’s vision in Genesis 28:10-17. Jacob dreams about a ladder established one earth, with the top reaching to heaven. “And behold,” the text demands, “the angels of God ascending and descending.” Notice that the angels move up and down the ladder, for readers do not climb the rungs of Guigo’s ladder to contemplation and remain up there. Rather, the movement toward contemplation—while we remain on earth—requires continuous ascent and descent. We read, meditate, pray, contemplate, and start over again. The practices of reading that Guigo outlines correspond with the four senses of Scripture and help us understand how to move toward contemplative reading. (pp. 104-105)

And so the clumsy human spaceship finally entered Europa’s atmosphere. Patel and Bingleking silently monitored their screens as the ship’s engines rumbled. Bingleking’s euphoria was tempered by Patel’s weariness, though neither of the scientists turn astronauts paid much attention to affect. Cameras filmed the small craft’s descent. Filmed Patel and Bingleking’s anxious silence. Billions of people watched this voyage to Europa on tiny screens. This technological feat was made possible by the Bingleking Drive. By the NBA and by Starbucks and by the National Space Society and by this sponsor and by that donor and Whatever. “Who knows what you’re capable of? The owner of the Los Angeles Lakers asked as his face gave way to an image of Europa which gave way to a Nike swoosh. Jupiter’s moon was a pleasant distraction from thickening smog and drier coughs.

But the word "avatar" has much deeper roots. Ultimately in derives from the Hindu, from a word for "descent." An avatar is a manifestation of a god on the Earth. This is not like the divinity of Christ in the Christian religion; through the Incarnation Christ was God made man, whereas a Hindu avatar is more literally a god walking the Earth. Perhaps an avatar is more like an angel of Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions.

He had been waiting a long time for a chance to come to this place. Years earlier he had spent a good bit of time in Florida on a serial case and the only good that had come out of it was his love of Cuban food. When he later transferred to the Los Angeles field office it was hard to find a Cuban restaurant that compared with the places where he had eaten in Ybor City outside of Tampa. Once on an L.A. case he’d come across a patrol cop who he learned was of Cuban descent. McCaleb asked him where he went to eat when he wanted real home cooking. The cop’s answer was El Cochinito. And McCaleb quickly became a regular. McCaleb decided that studying the menu was a waste of time because he had known all along what he wanted. Lechon asada with black beans and rice, fried bananas and yucca on the side and don’t bother telling the doctor.

The first mile was torture. I passed beneath the massive stone arch at the entrance to the school, pulled off the road and threw up. I felt better and ran down the long palm-lined drive to the Old Quad. Lost somewhere in the thicket to my left was the mausoleum containing the remains of the family by whom the university had been founded. Directly ahead of me loomed a cluster of stone buildings, the Old Quad. I stumbled up the steps and beneath an archway into a dusty courtyard which, with its clumps of spindly bushes and cacti, resembled the garden of a desert monastery. All around me the turrets and dingy stone walls radiated an ominous silence, as if behind each window there stood a soldier with a musket waiting to repel any invader. I looked up at the glittering facade of the chapel across which there was a mosaic depicting a blond Jesus and four angels representing Hope, Faith, Charity, and, for architectural rather than scriptural symmetry, Love. In its gloomy magnificence, the Old Quad never failed to remind me of the presidential palace of a banana republic. Passing out of the quad I cut in front of the engineering school and headed for a back road that led up to the foothills. There was a radar installation at the summit of one of the hills called by the students the Dish. It sat among herds of cattle and the ruins of stables. It, too, was a ruin, shut down for many years, but when the wind whistled through it, the radar produced a strange trilling that could well be music from another planet. The radar was silent as I slowed to a stop at the top of the Dish and caught my breath from the upward climb. I was soaked with sweat, and my headache was gone, replaced by giddy disorientation. It was a clear, hot morning. Looking north and west I saw the white buildings, bridges and spires of the city of San Francisco beneath a crayoned blue sky. The city from this aspect appeared guileless and serene. Yet, when I walked in its streets what I noticed most was how the light seldom fell directly, but from angles, darkening the corners of things. You would look up at the eaves of a house expecting to see a gargoyle rather than the intricate but innocent woodwork. The city had this shadowy presence as if it was a living thing with secrets and memories. Its temperament was too much like my own for me to feel safe or comfortable there. I looked briefly to the south where San Jose sprawled beneath a polluted sky, ugly and raw but without secrets or deceit. Then I stretched and began the slow descent back into town.

Yehohshua knelt in the shallow water and began a quiet, earnest prayer. Yehuway listened to His son’s words. “Father, I am here beginning the walk to eternal life. Father, I have diligently maintained Your ways and laws in my heart. I have pursued You through the long nights and have nourished Your words in the light. Here I am, waiting for You to speak to me.” As the sun lowered behind the mountain, the shadows lengthened over Yehohshua and Yehohanan. An ethereal energy overtook Yehohshua’ body. The thickening lavender and yellow and red clouds above them suddenly spread open, revealing a patch of blue beyond the clouds’ dome. From the vacant reach Yehohshua stared at the rapid descent of the Ruach Ha Kodesh that took the shape of a dove. The fluttering white image fully covered Yehohshua. Within its opulent cove, bolts of lightning struck the ground. The intense, brief, flashes arced about Yehohshua, silhouetting his body. “You are My beloved son,” Yehuway’s voice transferred out from the multitude of lightning strikes, “with whom I am well pleased.” Yehohanan sank to his knees when he heard the words. The water flowed up to his chin. He lowered his eyes to the depths of the river, catching the sight of a few fish swimming by. Yehohshua’s garment appeared as the wings of an angel beneath the water. Yehohanan also prayed thanks to Yehuway. His long locks of hair unraveled and flowed out from behind him in a tranquil surrender to the events. From the experience, an invisible umbilical cord of purpose united the two men.

DC at night had a particular savage gleam, red taillights piercing through gloom, dingy alleys bookending martini-lounge hustle-bustle. And yet another realm hovered above in an angelic glow, the eye called to uplit white marble monuments, to rounded domes and thrusting peaks, to glowing penthouses floating above streets as dark as puddles. Everything that rose seemed to be mirrored in descent, the reflecting pool and the cool Potomac like portals to an underworld. Wetzel had read somewhere that Hollywood directors liked to hose down streets to make the asphalt sparkle on film. Washington was like that naturally, a black-ice kind of town – lose focus and you’d slip and break your neck.

to be human is to be a slave to death by a thousand insignificant means.

We were his ruin. She saw that now. They had doomed Ike with their dependence. He would have been a thousand miles away if not for their weakness and ignorance and pride. That’s what had kept him bound to them. Guardian angels were like that. Doomed by their pathos.

...Did you know he was keeping a journal, too? He was writing an account of his life, but editing out the parts where he murdered people for their body parts. He made himself the hero...You are - if you were worried - an angel on earth, faultless, beautiful, and utterly and completely in love with him.' 'I had no idea he had such a talent for fiction.' 'Mm,' she said. 'You were also murdered by Adam on your wedding night! Such drama, Victor was committed to an asylum for some time after, so great his mourning.' 'That insufferable ass,' I hissed.

[Orson Pratt] argued that only God could administer curses and that they were specific to a given time and place. In his estimation, enslavers who suggested that biblical curses were still in force had taken it upon themselves 'to execute the curse of Almighty upon that race without being commanded to do it and they will have to be punished for rising up and inflicting this curse upon [the] descendants of Adam.' Even if God did curse Ham or Canaan or Cain in the Bible, Pratt did not believe that such curses passed down to anyone else. He rejected the notion that nineteenth-century enslavers, including Latter-Day Saints, had any authority from God to enslave Black people. 'Shall we assume the right without the voice of [the] Lord speaking to us and commanding us to [introduce] slavery into our territory?' Pratt queried. He was dismayed by such a prospect... People of African descent were not guilty of some premortal sin for which slavery was the penalty, Pratt said. 'Shall we take then the innocent African that has committed no sin and damn him to slavery and bondage without receiving any authority from heaven to do [so]? That they and their children shall be servants to us and our children? The idea is preposterous in my mind,' he demanded. 'For us to bind the African because he is different from us in color [is] enough to cause the angels in heaven to blush![']... 'We have no proof that the Africans are the descendants of old Cain who was cursed, and even if we had that evidence we have not been ordered to inflict that [curse] upon that race.

Tradition is a fine ideal, but not when it serves as a shackle on our future endeavours.

In my experience, civilised men don’t like their justice kept so simple. They like to complicate things.

It was a calculated drop into darkness,” continued the angel, “into a vibration so low it had not been experienced by this soul group previously. So in this experiment, genetically through the DNA, this code [the energy of fear] was passed and truly became a far-reaching code that many other soul groups adopted, seeing that it was useful in descending into lower levels of frequency.” The angel was referring to the desire of souls to experience contrast in order to arrive at a deeper self-knowing. “The further distance from the truth of one’s being, the darker it becomes and the lower the frequency. “As the soul group through incarnations makes its way through this murky, heavy energy, it clears. [The soul group] becomes cognizant once again of the light, the truth. Its awareness becomes stabilized. Those beings, when eventually they leave this wheel of reincarnation and move into other realms, take with them knowledge of that descent from the light. Does this answer your question?

Her younger sister Paulina dropped out of school to run around Los Angeles and Europe, but because she was dating men with titles and was written about in Town & Country and Vogue, she was deemed “good for the Pavlin name.” Celeste’s descent into academic bohemia . . . not so much. As for Elodie, who had worked in the family business since her undergraduate years at Columbia, she now seemed to be pursuing a master’s degree in kissing their father’s ass. After a while, both her parents stopped asking—aside from Thanksgiving and winter break—when she was coming to visit. So Celeste was surprised one afternoon to return to her apartment to find an urgent answering machine message from her father summoning her to New York. She called him at the office, expecting that her usual excuses would work. But Alan was having none of it. “This is non-negotiable. All three of you girls

They can live as guardian angels for a while as part of their spiritual development.

In times of danger, pray to God to open heaven to you. Invite the angels to show themselves to you. Ask Jesus to save you. This world will fade away.

When Los Angeles was founded in 1781—as a city of angels—by a group of eleven families, it seemed to throw out a welcome mat to people of color. After all, of that founding group—forty-four men, women, and children—twenty-six were of African descent, black or “black Spaniards,” as they were sometimes called.

It is one of those circular facts of history that, in the three great receiving cities to which southern blacks fled—the cities that drew Ida Mae, George, and Robert—blacks had been among the first nonnatives to set foot on the soil and to establish settlements centuries before. Black mestizos were among the forty-four Mexican settlers arriving in 1781 at the pueblo that would become Los Angeles. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, a fur trader born of an African slave woman in Haiti, built, in 1779, the first permanent settlement in what is now known as Chicago.43 Jan Rodrigues, a sailor of African descent working for and later abandoned by Dutch merchants on an untamed island in the New World, created the first trading post on what is now known as Manhattan, in 1613.

The number of Thine own complete, Sum up and make an end; Sift clean the chaff, and house the wheat— And then, O Lord, descend. “Descend, and solve by that descent, This mystery of life; Where good and ill, together blent, Wage an undying strife. “For rivers twain are gushing still, And pour a mingled flood; Good in the very depths of ill— Ill in the heart of good. “The last are first, the first are last, As angel eyes behold; These from the sheepcote sternly cast, Those welcomed to the fold. “No Christian home, no pastor’s eye, No preacher’s vocal zeal, Moved Thy dear martyr to defy The prison and the wheel. “Forth from the heathen ranks she stepped The forfeit throne to claim Of Christian souls who had not kept Their birthright and their name. “Grace formed her out of sinful dust; She knelt a soul defiled; She rose in all the faith and trust And sweetness of a child. “And in the freshness of that love She preached by word and deed, The mysteries of the world above— Her new-found glorious creed. “And running, in a little hour, Of life the course complete, She reached the throne of endless power, And sits at Jesus’ feet. “Her spirit there, her body here, Make one the earth and sky; We use her name, we touch her bier, We know her God is nigh.