“What Are You Doing? That Medicine Is Killing You.”

by Mary Grace McCord

Paul Simon wrote a song about “seeing angels in the architecture.” Bret Bradford sees angels in aluminum foil. In paint splotches. Even in hospital rooms.

Bret has been through a lot in his 37 years. His father and teenage brother were murdered when he was only nine years old. The next year, he was kidnapped by a distant relative who has since died in prison for crimes of preying on children.

When the Birmingham boy moved to San Francisco to escape painful memories and to find himself, he instead witnessed two fiery deaths in a freak explosion which haunted his dreams for years.

That was before a Bay-area doctor diagnosed Bret's hand tremors and numbness as symptoms of terminal brain cancer. Physicians offered neurosurgery and chemotherapy as palliative rather than curative therapies.

Bret returned to Birmingham to say goodbye to his mother and his friends at Unity Church, then returned to San Francisco for toxic therapies that rendered him almost immobile and numbed his speech.

“There in the hospital I thought I was dying, so I started counting my blessings and at that moment, I was visited by a lovely, loving apparition, a rose-colored woman. Her glowing skin reminded me how shriveled, pale and frail I had become. She said, 'What are you doing? That medicine is killing you.'”

At that moment, Bret decided to refuse chemotherapy and seek a second opinion, through his new friends at Unity Church in San Francisco. The next doctors attributed his worsening numbness and tremors to a series of strokes — which may have been exacerbated by chemotherapy. The first diagnosis was wrong. He didnšt have cancer at all.

His family begged him to come home to Birmingham for physical therapy, and that's when Brad became an angel artist.

Bret's first two guardian angel sculptures were dedicated to the memory of those whose deaths he witnessed; he says their creation eased his nightmares. His method is to shape each figure from aluminum foil. Inside, he adds healing herbs and seven stones to represent the chakras. He then covers the form with plaster, coats it with metallic paint, and mounts the guardian angel on a marble or granite base. Each is anointed with oil and blessed.

Bret received an acrylic paint set for Christmas some years ago, and spent an entire frustrating day trying to contort his residual hand tremors into flowing brush strokes. Feeling defeated, he dejectedly scraped the paint off his brushes, absent-mindedly wiping and daubing at the canvas that he felt was ruined.

That's when he noticed a pattern of rays, radiating away from a center splotch that resembled an angel. Thus began his angel portals series. Bret was now a multi-media angel artist!

“Only when I removed my ego and the need to create from a conscious level did these paintings come forth,” he said. “The angel portals are very special to me for I know they came from that divine spark within.”

In this miraculous new millennium, the artist has yet another new voice. Bret Bradford's mystical story of angelic intervention will be told by Brad Styger as a chapter in his new book, Missions (release date, 2/00). Bret has since begun work on a manuscript for his own book, And the Angels Came. For more information: Bretbford@aol.com.