In the Company of Angels : Books: Author Sophy Burnham believes she met an angel during a near-fatal experience. The result: “A Book of Angels.”

Do angels have feet? Teeth? Tears? Do they hover invisibly above, or walk among us disguised as humans? Are they capable of independent acts or are they commanded? Do they exist at all? And if so, would we, in our miasma of smog, traffic and information overload, recognize an angel if we saw one?

In Los Angeles, where we talk of angels every time we mention where we live, do we ever stop to ponder the nature of the spirits whose name we so constantly invoke?

Sophy Burnham, a Washington-based writer, believes she has met angels and that her life was even saved by one.

Burnham was barreling down a European mountain on her back, head first, during a ski accident that she believed would lead to certain death. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t stop.

Suddenly, she writes, her fall was stopped by a mysterious skier who stood in her path. He was “dressed completely in black.” She looked into his eyes. “They, too, were black, but full of such light I could not move.”

Neither she nor her then-husband, who had watched helplessly as she fell, could figure out where the man came from or where he went.

Some time later she began to jot down the “curious and mysterious” occurrences she’d experienced and heard about from others. Angel sightings, you might say.

Along with these notes, she gathered her favorite references to angels by great poets and philosophers. The result, “A Book of Angels,” (Ballantine: $8.95) is a kind of timeless tour, led by ordinary people who’ve met angels, and extraordinary writers who’ve set down ageless thoughts: Milton, Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, Blake, Rilke, Dostoevsky, Swedenborg, and Poe, along with passages from the Bible and Koran.

Perhaps Burnham’s most poignant angel “encounter” occurred while she was dickering with her dying mother in a hospital. “I hunched in my chair, hurt and angry, wondering if I should simply get up and leave. . . . There were things we should be saying to each other, not nagging, picking at me so.”

Not even the entry of a hospital worker quieted her mother’s tirade. Suddenly the Jamaican woman stopped her moping and said, “ ‘I grudge you the mother-talk.’ ”

“ ‘I grudge you the mother-talk,’ she repeated, looking from one to the other of us, smiling with a broad, gold smile. ‘My own mother died when I was 12,’ she sang, ‘and I’ve had no one in all these years to give me mother-talk. It is so nice to hear.’ ”

Burnham “sat up even straighter, hit by joy. Of course. She (Burnham’s mother) was cuffing the cub, was all. I had not understood.”

The hospital worker “left them in a different state,” Burnham writes. “We began to talk on another level. We could approach the topic of death, say how much we cared for each other. A week later she was dead.”

Burnham says she wrote the book for “all the people who’ve had similar experiences and don’t trust them. I want them to know they are not alone. Also for all the people who have not had an experience with angels. All the religions tell us there are angels, and we all need to know there is someone taking care of us.”

Msgr. George J. Parnassus, pastor of Saint Victor’s Catholic Church, says: “There is an order of beings called angels. They are creatures, which means they are not divine in nature. God alone is divine. (But) angels are a higher order of being than we are. They are pure spirits. They have intellect and free will. According to Catholic philosophy they have intuitive intellect as opposed to our (human) intellect, which is rational and discursive.

“A discursive intellect is one that runs a gamut of successive ideas or thoughts about a matter. Human beings think in pictures. As one picture recedes from our mind, another takes its place. . . .”

Parnassus continues, “The intuitive (angel) intellect does not depend on pictures or the building up of information. It gets the whole thing at once. But once an angel has made up its mind, it will never change its mind. . . .

“The angel can never say ‘I’m sorry,’ which leads to an enormously important question raised in the New Testament: Why did God, for the sake of redeeming mankind, become a man?. . . . Answer: Because man could pay attention to God, to Jesus, to the Gospel. He could reconsider his relationship with God and say ‘I’m sorry.’ But if God became an angel, and appeared among them, they wouldn’t reconsider. So what appears in man to be a defect, his imperfect intellect, may indeed be an asset. . . .”

Orthodox associate Rabbi Aron Tendler, of Shaarey Zedek Congregation in North Hollywood and principal at Yeshiva University boys’ high school, says, “Angels have no independence whatsoever. (They) are creations of God, totally spiritual in their existence. They have the ability to appear on occasion as physical. They can’t be good or bad, because they only do what God tells them to do, and God can do no bad. We (Orthodox) Jews have the notion that there is an angel assigned to every child, who will then teach the child its capacity to know God.”

Burnham is so convinced that angels help us that she has a note and an address at the back of her book, asking people who’ve had “mystical experiences” to share them with her.

She writes, quoting the Bible, “Be not afraid to have strangers in your house, for some thereby have entertained angels unawares.”