After a few months of struggling through Jesus’ assignment, Frank and Ralph requested a sit-down to explain their updated grasp of women's essence.

While they chatted with the Logos in the hallowed halls where angels alone were allowed, out on the lovely, less-shielded gathering places closer to the ground, I had begun my search for primary sources, hopefully agush with vital, newsy bits about the angelic realm.

A newbie to Heaven during Jesus’ rescue from Gehenna, I hadn’t yet been introduced to Frank and Ralph. From day one in Paradise, however, producing a summation, background, and introduction to angels framed my heavenly task among the holy ones.

My soon-to-be prolific self decided to start on the angel project by wandering into conversations and confabs. Gathering background was tough. I caught no one’s eye, even as I butted my way into discourses, with unfortunate disregard for charm or panache. I slipped unwelcomed into and out of angel circles, leaving with only innuendo, long stares, murmurs to my left and right, and repeated dismissals delivered with arched eyebrows.

(Though this documentary on my difficulties in Paradise sounds like I’m including God in my path of missteps, the important point is that we, residents of Heaven, acknowledge God’s promptings and accept his prescience about our limitations. We’re still a work in progress. Forever. Yes, character growth still happens here. God is the same. What’s different for us from earthen days with God is that there are no murky suppositions, guilt, shame, and certainly no temptations in Heaven. We trip and get caught by God in midair, learned now, keen, and more cleverly holy.)

Unaware Frank and Ralph would be the only advisors necessary for my documentary journey, I tried to get my bearings by taking advantage of the opportunities the Holy Spirit gave me, and it was quite the education in angelic behavior.

Angels are rude. From the human perspective, that is. They have better things to do. Things with ancient underpinnings and unspoken importance.

You may have guessed that in the tales written so far in this Magnus Angelipudous Opus (we joke around in Heaven), where it seemed I was present with Jesus, Frank, and Ralph, I was not. I'd never heard of the conjoined duo until 40 days after entering Paradise. I stood perched on Heaven’s mezzanine to view the Ascension with several million or billions (way too many to count) onlookers rescued from Gehenna.

Frank and Ralph provided me with the previous three chapters in living, intricate detail at various moments over the past 2,000 years. Many details were added hundreds of years following our introduction. This, then, is a dynamic document. If the text sounds choppy . . . well . . . after hundreds of edits over thousands of years . . . it is.

While I wandered where angels fearlessly tread (see what I did there?), that secret meet-up with Jesus and the two partnered angels occurred during a pivotal, cosmically altered time in Heaven. Jesus, for the record, can do many things at once, especially considering the thorough monitoring abilities of the Holy Spirit and the inescapable presence of the Father involved in everyone’s deliberations. I do not insinuate any difficulties for God in my following descriptions of those first days when humanity roamed about Heaven and touched celestial items originally meant for us to experience but hidden until now.

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When Jesus was a child, and the angels were his guardians, he called them "Afee" and "Onka." Besides being adorable, the names were a tease. Frank and Ralph had known Jesus long before then — almost forever ago. They met shortly after time became a consequence of creation. 

Jesus, besides seeing angels, reading the minds of everyone around him, predicting the future, and being able to sit up on his own at one month old, dialed back his divinity. He operated within his physical limits, including baby talk, which disturbed everyone in Heaven.

“He didn’t play dumb,” Ralph assured me. “Awe, come on.”

“What does ‘Awe, come on,’ mean, Ralph?” Frank asked. Frank had been saying the phrase all morning. “I don’t think you’re using it right.”

He then looked over at me. “Look, Ipomoea, Jesus just played as close to his age as was reasonable.”

“Including him waxing eloquent on the scrolls at 12?” I asked with a bit of snarkiness. Since no one shared much about Jesus as a child, I thought I could get some insights.

“Well, yeah, but that was the result of pent-up human, inquisitive pre-teen boldness,” Frank said, defending Jesus.

“Awe, come on. He was human too, after all,” Ralph chimed in.

Frank lowered his head, sighing that Ralph’s new jargon might catch on.

“Fair enough,” I allowed.

The rules of logic change when questioning God’s intentions. Jesus could take care of himself yet refused to overstep nature’s bounds. He could have his guardians stop every attack upon him. Instead, he held them back on almost every occasion. Jesus allowed the world to operate freely. He spoke with his guardian angels, which surprised me because nothing in scripture reveals their relationship.

“He was rather open about talking to us,” Ralph confirmed.

“I remember him hinting to many people that they should do the same,” Frank said, searching for an example. According to Frank and Ralph, angelic conversations were Jesus’ weak spot.

No one has reported on this, so that may be new information for you. It’s OK. You’re getting details on the angels for a reason. Before his incarnation and naming, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity knew Frank and Ralph’s full names. The ones humans can’t pronounce. The Logos (his pre-Jesus moniker) declared every angel’s name to beings in Heaven. The Father named each one. The Holy Spirit breathed the name into them, and the Son, the Logos, announced them publicly to the Heavenly Hosts.

Before the incarnation, eons before creatures existed, the Logos orchestrated the angels’ nurturing, ordering, and education. He aligned creation’s elements into the cosmos with the angels watching. At his every step, they flew in and out of Heaven.

In those days, there were no boundaries.

The Logos singled out Frank and Ralph very early, tickling his special angelic duo, racing after them in the depths of space when they were just pups. Faulty-formed pups, that is. Ralph and Frank improperly developed during their phantomic and ectoplasmic stages of spirit-based beginnings.

“Few people will know what you’re talking about, Ipomoea,” Frank noted, reviewing my texts. “Where did you get these words? Phantomic and ectoplasmic. A bit fancy, I think?”

“Those are the only human words I could find for something so wildly unfamiliar to material beings,” I said. “We don’t have proper words for angelic gestation and birth.”

“Awe, come on,” Ralph said. “It’s similar to the in-between state of steam becoming water . . . but stops right there. Angels exist as a gas in that middle phase, albeit with elements unknown to creation.”

“That’s not a helpful analogy at all,” Frank said, almost adding Ralph’s new phrase.

However one explains angels' ethereal and material states, I want to accurately convey the debilitating effect of Frank and Ralph’s brokenness. Voice throttling and sight mirroring (their two broken senses) were damaging incapabilities but not lethal. A freakish misstep in the final apses of their creation halted participation in the essential communication rhythms and harmonies common to all angels.

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Memorialized forever in Acts 1:9-11, our documentary on Frank and Ralph begins with their botched pronouncement as two hand-picked heralds of Jesus’ Ascension and promised return. Botched is probably too kind. “Cringe-worthy,” said Malachi, the Prophet, among those who witnessed from Heaven. “OMG!” said Thomas Sr., the Apostle Thomas’s father, present that day with the rest of the newly appointed creation royalty. Similarly late to most things, a trait picked up by his son, Thomas Senior said, “I got there a little late but saw a very non-angelic fiasco. Wow.”

Rather than putting a finishing touch on a glorious display of Jesus, arms outstretched and floating into the divine entryway, our quirky angel friends abruptly shattered a unique, highly orchestrated, prayerful gathering of Heaven and Earth. Practically every one of historical fame positioned themselves to watch the Son of God and Son of Man reconnect creation with the divine realm. Solomon wasn’t there. He was putting the final touches on a song he’d prepared for Jesus.

Nobody talked about any of those fabulous history-making tidbits. “Nooooo!” moaned Aaron. He’d waited thousands of years for the Messiah’s heavenly entrance. After he saw Jesus turn and watch Frank and Ralph, so did everyone else. Using his ancient friends to speak was Christ’s idea. The conjoined angels’ final act backfired on the Son of God. Aaron thought he saw a smirk on Jesus’ face, but that couldn’t be true.

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Frank & Ralph

The Retired Guardian Angels Of Jesus

By John Francis Pearring, Jr., adapted from an ethereal script by Ipomoea

From left to right,
that’s Ralph and Frank.
After we took the picture,
Frank insisted Ralph’s name
come first in the title.
They would not pose
for another photograph.
Angels are difficult to please,
and polite to a fault.

(If you only knew how clever was their compromise.)

Copyright Page

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations (except those within citations) are from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

TextPros, LLC has received non-exclusive, world rights in English for the illustrations beginning each chapter, given by John Pearring regarding the print and electronic editions of this book.

Published online, chapter by chapter, for paywall subscribers to The Catholic Nutshell News.

Copyright © 2023

Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

Front cover image of Frank & Ralph image adapted from Meridy Scott from Pixabay.

Illustrations by John Pearring morphed from Pixabay art.

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Unfortunately, humans cannot pronounce or spell an angel’s full forename. We are left with a nom de guerre, a dubbed trifle of the original. Poor translations—like Gabriel, Raphael, and Ariel—only hint at an angel’s grand name. So, too, with Frank and Ralph. We must settle on their christened aliases, which are noteworthy. They are the first two beings nicknamed by our incarnated Redeemer just months after Jesus’ birth.

You can see Frank and Ralph’s honorarium to the left of Heaven’s main entry gate to the City. From the city, while at the gate, lean out, look a hundred yards to your right—about when letters are indistinguishable to a Heavenly soul’s squint—then count twenty carvings up the wall, midway.

Or, walk a hundred yards and gaze upward. Just there. Frank & Ralph. These two celestial creatures helped me, Ipomoea, write this book.

Like all acclaimed angels, Frank and Ralph deserve mention on the Honor Wall. They accomplished feats great and wonderful, and shared their lives willingly with me, an unheralded man charged with a research project for a distant future. I doubt any other angels could have provided the insight I needed to understand the angelic realm. Angels don’t quickly or eagerly converse with humans.

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