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Sunday 7 November 2010

How Doctor Who is not doing us any favours

Don't get me wrong here, I love Doctor Who (although I must confess to preferring David Tennant), but from one perspective, the writers are really not helping us on a spiritual level.

How many of you have seen the episodes concerning the 'Weeping Angels'?

...And how many of you find them extremely creepy at best, and downright terrifying at worst! I am most definitely in the second category there; in fact my daughter has had a job on her hands just to get me to watch the latest episodes with them in! How completely ludicrous is it for a woman of my age to be hiding behind the sofa (again)!

But seriously, I wonder if they have really thought this through?

By turning angels into something to be feared and shunned, we are closing our minds into the incredible support, love and help that is there just a heartbeat away for every single one of us.

It's quite clever really, and just a bit sinister. If you plug 'Angel Statue' into Google Images, you will get thousands of pictures of them, some in overgrown graveyards, stone figures covered with creeping lichen, black mildew, sightless eyes and reaching hands that would induce nightmares in the most sane of us... A vision of decaying guardians over our dead. Lovely.

The fact that the Weeping Angels are in a recognisably human form, only move when we are not looking, and have nice, sharp, pointy teeth, makes it all so much more plausible; when I was hiding behind the sofa in the 1960's, I was hiding from daleks (only had to go up a flight of stairs to escape them!), things not remotely like humans!

The reality of course that whilst none of us know what an angel really looks like, we have been programmed, through art and religious texts, to visualise them as something in human form with wings, from cherubs to archangels.
If you are lucky enough to have had an angelic experience, a visitation in which an angel has shown themselves to you, then that is probably what you saw, as they tend to show themselves in a way which we are used to, so as not to seem threatening, or alarming.
(Off the wall thought here; what if angels were really 20 foot high spiders? Scary or what!)

We need to be opening our hearts and our minds to the possibilities that actively inviting in our guides, guardians and angels can offer, not scaring our children stupid and potentially seriously harming their spiritual development.
They cannot 'interfere' unless we invite them in, I have had oodles of proof that they really are there, (that I am not just a mad old bat!) and that they really can throw those opportunities in our path that we need. I shall tell you all about them some day!

If the Weeping Angels had featured on Doctor Who in the 1960's, when I was growing up, I am not sure I would be quite so comfortable with my guardian angels now...

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