Present Tense Shane HegartyThe brochure for my local secondary school's night classes arrived in the house during the week. And there, alongside motorcycle maintenance and wine tasting, was an eight-week "workshop" in Angel Therapy.
At which point, I wanted nothing more than to squeeze the brochure until the angels were just feathered smudges on the page.
Perhaps it would be worth calling the school and offering to teach a class of my own: one on how to find fairies at the bottom of the garden; or on hunting for unicorns; or spotting leprechauns; or talking to your inner pixie. But enough of people's time is already being wasted.
The angels fad has been with us for a few years. The blighters were relatively untroubled until the 1990s, when they suddenly found themselves called into increasing action for anything from major operations to stalled cars. Beginning in the US, this trend was heartily embraced by the trinket manufacturers. You might have thought a guardian angel could go about its important deeds motivated by heavenly reward alone. Not so. It turns out that it requires the added encouragement provided by cherub-shaped tat.
Which is why you can go to angel shops and buy angel prayer boxes, pendants, candles and countless books on how to get a direct line to your guardian angel. You can buy pins shaped as "bowling angels" (complete with miniature bowling ball and pin) or the popular "slot machine angel", which is a "great gift for the slots player or to wear yourself to bring you luck in all your gambling". It must work very well, because there is no "moneylender angel".
Actually, in the US, there has been a downturn in the angel merchandise market in recent years. But the trend's backwash continues to roll up on our shores. If you visit Westport's upcoming Wellness Week there will be an Angel Therapy class - guaranteed to bring a healthy glow to somebody's wallet at least. And last April, Belfast hosted its first-ever Angel Day, "providing Ulster people the opportunity to learn more about the burgeoning belief system". As if belief systems haven't done enough for Ulster.
Angels are popular, although mainly among women, who - for whatever reason - tend to be more inclined towards horoscopes, psychics, and whatever other mixum-gatherum of paranormal, religiosity and New Age that features in this week's issue of Take a Break.
It is sufficiently in vogue, and profitable, that plenty of Irish schools can be unworried about allowing such an intellectually retrograde activity into a place of learning. Happy to rent out a room for an evening, schools all over the country will host Angel Therapy classes over the coming months. Higher institutions have been equally guilty. A couple of years ago, NUI Galway rented a room to an Angel Therapy class. It was listed on the university's website, without any hint of self-consciousness, just after the talk on Cultural Boundaries on a Local Scale: Religion and Identity at Castlehacket, 1844-1872.
Allowing Angel Therapy into schools and colleges lends it a quasi-academic veneer and encourages the notion that it, and the plethora of supernatural hokum feeding into and out of it, is an actual scientific discipline. This can be heard in the woman quoted in the Dubliner magazine last year, who explained that what she liked about a particular practitioner was that "she uses numerology, where the planets are in the universe, and what phases they are moving into to explain why we behave the way we do. So it's not all crystal ball readings with lotto numbers and promises of great fortune. It's very scientific." Oh yes, a Nobel prize can't be far away.
Maybe it's petty to find it so objectionable - after all, most Irish school's religious roots have led them to teach some questionable stuff in the standard curriculum. But the class in my local school is offering "healing and meditation", and it's this common promise of "healing" through angel therapy that makes it less harmless.
Besides, taking this increased communication with guardian angels, then one would presume there have been some measurable benefits for those who call on them most. Are these people less likely to be ill? When they get sick, are they more likely to get well soon? Are they less likely to be in car accidents? More likely to have healthy families? When their keys go missing, do they find them more quickly? Given the numbers who, in recent years, have attended these classes, who believe in angels, and who have bought the books and charms, then one could expect a measurable impact on health statistics. Instead, you can be certain that the only positive impact it's had is on some people's bank accounts.
As with all fads, of course, it will wane. Angels will join the celestial dole queues alongside the line of saints on whose constant intercession we used to rely for help. And the schools will go on renting rooms for whatever subject is popular.
Although if people really are so eager to communicate with fictional characters, perhaps the schools could put on more creative writing classes.