I see him first in the aisle of Wells Cathedral, slouching towards me in his black rain jacket, black joggers, black sneakers and with his black dog held close on a black leash, like some guardian of the Gates of Hell, lost at the Gates of Heaven. At one of the handmade tapestries exhibited in the nave, depicting a vibrant rainbow and many colourful birds, he bounces up and down on the balls of his feet, chanting “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”

A second time I see him in the apse, in the red light of the stained glass, his Italian Mastiff barking at a woman who came too close. He reassures the woman that “really she’s a good dog, just shy”, his voice rolling over the foreign words. When he calls the dog by its name, it is some ancient-sounding word I cannot understand. It turns silently back to its master, a long white scar running the length of its black side.

A third time I see him contemplating a tapestry of Lucifer, a snake curling along his back, as he plunges downwards from heaven. He looks at me and says “It is beautiful. It is like life – it has its ups and downs”.

His name is Michał, the archangel, and his face is divine and dangerous. White-blond hair and heavy brows frame blue eyes full of passionate intensity, full of a burning madness that spills, sizzling, into his jerking movements and sudden bursts of disturbing hehehehehes.

He is Polish, 39, and has lived in many great cities, Warsaw, Rome, Bath and now Wells, and has lived, as he says, “a very rebellious, very danceful life”. The way he says danceful makes me think of the old church doctrines forbidding dance because of the sin it engendered. I get a sense this man knew sin. He has lines on his face like cuts, like life had held a knife to him and dared him to take one more step towards whatever it was he had been running at.

“My heart led me here,” he continues, “Which is such a painful but such a rewarding way to live!” and he cackles, and then changes the story and says it was his guardian angel who spoke to him. He was led by heart or heaven to Wells Cathedral and it was here, beneath the statues of Jesus and the 12 apostles and the many pigeons that cluster around their saintly stone, that he was born again. He felt the Holy Spirit enter him, radiate out from inside his chest all throughout his body like fire, and in his mind he felt a great “Boom!” and he was, behold, a new man.

As he speaks, he whips the end of the black leash round and round like a lasso screaming to be released. He is a boy, flaming with energy, making high-pitched sound effects and baring comic grins, and always that deranged laughter, as though he is speaking not only to me but to a whole crowd in his head, desperate to please and amuse.

He is, I think, as Jesus might have been – hypnotic, strikingly handsome and unhinged. Jesus too, like Michał, must have had this mad fire in him, electric, that makes you feel as though, were you to touch it, you too would stand on the precipice of the known, of the accepted, and might teeter and fall into that dark realm of saints and serpents.