Ralph & Frank, Chapter 3: Stares from Heaven

One could speak for the other, and the other could see for the one

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.