Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC
Saint Michael and All Angels - Wednesday, September 29, 2021
Oración Al Angel De La Guarda
Angel de mi guarda
oh mi dulce compañía
no me desampares ni de
noche ni de día hasta que
me entregues en los brazos
de Jesús y de María. Con
tus alas me persigno y me
abrazo de la Cruz y en
mi corazón me llevo al
dulcísimo Jesús.
Amén.
(Guardian Angel, my sweet companion, do not desert me during the night or during the day, until you deliver me into the arms of Jesus and Mary. With your wings I make the sign of the cross and embrace it, and in my heart a carry my sweet Jesus. ~Amen)
I was a very devout little boy growing up in Puerto Rico, and this is a prayer I said on my knees by my bedside every night. I looked for the English version of the prayer and it does not seem to exist. The prayers to the Guardian Angel in English are very different. So, what you just heard is my own translation.
We all have either talked about or heard someone talk about guardian angels. And we have either experienced or heard about what is described as ‘third person’ experiences, following a line in T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland: ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together. But when I look ahead up the white road, there is always another one walking beside you’.
I must admit that the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels is one of my favorites. For one thing, the music for the antiphons of the Offices is awesome. And the texts are awe-inspiring and remind us that the richness and diversity of God's creation far exceeds what our eyes can see, or our rational minds can comprehend. I said I was a very devout little boy, and then, I became an actor, of the operatic kind, so you know, that’s drama times four! The older I get the more aware I seem to become of the mysterious cosmic drama we are all are part of. There is a much bigger picture that we mostly don’t pay attention to or think about.
The lectionary today treats us to three familiar scripture stories about angels: the story of Jacob’s ladder; the story of the war in heaven in which Michael, leading the angels (the good ones!), beats the dragon, Satan, the deceiver of the whole world and his angels (the bad ones!); and finally, the gospel story of Jesus telling Nathanael that he will see something like Jacob’s ladder, “ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
But accounts in both, the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, of created beings other than humans who worship God in heaven and act as God’s messengers and agents on earth abound. We are not told much about them, and it is not clear how much of what is told is figurative, but it is all, nevertheless, important truth. In the Hebrew Scriptures, it is occasionally reported that someone saw a person who spoke to them with authority, and who they then realized was no mere human, but a messenger or agent of God. The word for “messenger” in Hebrew is malach, in Greek, angelos, from which the word "angel" derives.
Angels have appeared to Abraham, Lot, Daniel, Zechariah, the Virgin Mary, and to those at Jesus’ tomb on the morning of the Resurrection. Angels have spoken to prophets, closed the mouths of lions, forced donkeys off their paths (remember that one?), appeared in dreams, guarded a garden, and killed off enemies of God’s people.
There are specific kinds of angels identified in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Cherubim (who apparently are not cute chubby babies!)– one of whom is placed with a flaming sword to guard the gateway to the Garden of Eden in Genesis (Ch. 3) and who are said to flank or support God’s throne as, for example, in Hezekiah’s prayer in the book of the Prophet Isaiah (Ch. 37). The Seraphim – whom Isaiah describes as having “six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew,” and who sing God’s praises at the heavenly throne.
We know the names of the archangels: Gabriel, who is named in the Book of Daniel and identified in the Gospel of Luke as the angel of the Annunciation; Raphael, who is identified as a companion and advisor to Tobias in the apocryphal Book of Tobit; Uriel, who was sent to test the prophet Ezra according to the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras; and Michael, who is the leader of God’s angel army in today’s passage from Revelation.
According to the Book of Job, angels were created before the physical world: in questioning Job, God asks him if he was there when the foundations of the earth were put in place, “when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”
So, we know a lot about angels, but why do we venerate them? What is the value to us of remembering the Holy Angels? What can we learn from them? Angels prick our conscience and point in the right direction so that we can recognize and follow the will of God. They connect heaven and earth, climbing up and down that ladder, which is Christ, drawing us closer to the Divine Presence, and opening our eyes to God. Demons, those bad angels who chose to disobey God and be God’s enemies, remind us that the higher we are the lower we can fall. The greater our gifts and talents, the greater the damage if we use them with the wrong intensions and without humility.
In his book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, a phrase taken from the conclusion of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker named four of these “better angels:”
• Empathy, which “prompts us to feel the pain of others and to align their interests with our own”
• Self-control, which “allows us to anticipate the consequences of acting on our impulses” and thus to regulate those impulses
• Moral sense, which “sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people”
• Reason, which “allows us to extract ourselves from our parochial vantage points.”
These are a sort of modern merging of the nine attributes St. Paul called the “fruit of the Spirit”: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23) It is through these fruits and gifts that human conscience is informed, and conscience, as Thomas Merton said, “is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.” (No Man Is an Island)
We can learn much from angels as the prompters of our conscience, as the “better angels” of empathy, moral sense, self-control, and reason, as the communicators of the gifts and fruits of the Spirit, and as mediators of God’s presence in the Church. But perhaps most importantly, angels help lead us to the passion of Christ and the cross. And this is important because it is only through embracing the cross that we find our way to God.
So, as our beloved Brother Andrew Colquhoun once said, if you don’t believe in angels, then for Christ’s sake become one. Become a healer, and a proclaimer; become a warrior against hunger and hopelessness and evil; be a Light Bearer in the darkness around us. And remember to always “show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. (Hebrews 13:2)
¡Que así sea, en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo!
Amen+
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