Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josep Martinez-Cubero OHC
Saint Michael and All Angels, September 29, 2023
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.
I used to pray that prayer to the Guardian Angel every night as a child growing up in Puerto Rico. The translation goes something like this:
Guardian Angel, my sweet companion, do not desert me during the night nor 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, I carry my sweet Jesus. ~Amen
The belief in guardian angels comes from various Gospel passages that tell us that one of the functions of angels is to guard and protect, especially the safety of “the little ones”. So, when I was a child I was taught that each of us has an angel appointed by God to accompany and protect us. I still believe it.
In an article for “Seasons”, a short-lived Dominican magazine in the sixties, Thomas Merton describes angels as “our…fellow servants in a world of freedom and of grace… [T]hey come to us as invisible messengers of [Christ’s] divine will, as mysterious protectors and friends in the spiritual order. Their presence around us, unimaginable, tender, solicitous and mighty, terrible as it is gentle, is more and more forgotten while the personal horizon of our spiritual vision shrinks and closes in upon ourselves.
The much advertised "death of God" - that "absence" which is one of the most significant features of our modern world - is no doubt due in large part to our incapacity to hear the voices of heavenly messengers. We have forgotten how to trust these strangers, and because of our suspicion we have denied them. Mistrust of the Lord begins therefore with mistrust of his messengers. And how easy it is to mistrust those invisible ones who speak more by sudden and significant silences than by clear and probative statements.
For the angels "prove" nothing, not even themselves. They efface themselves entirely in their messages. Yet it is by the silent power, the all-embracing clarity of their messages that we know them. God speaks to us in and through them, and in so doing he also speaks to us their identity, revealing in them strange and sacred personalities which bear witness to [God] in [God’s] utter hiddenness.”
Although it is difficult for the post-modern mind, with its rational sense of reality, to conceive of them, we all have either talked about or heard someone talk about angels. I personally have experienced times when I have been saved from some danger or have been spared the consequences of my own foolishness because God was there acting through some person I did not know and never saw again, or some force or energy I could not see or understand.
The idea of these mysterious beings was introduced to the Hebrew imagination (very likely from the Zoroastrian tradition) around the time of the Babylonian exile (6th century BCE), when it is generally believed the books of the Pentateuch were composed. So, there are many accounts in both, the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, of created beings other than humans who are sent to earth with different roles, functions and orders. They are usually identified by the word for “messenger”, in Hebrew malach, in Greek, angelos, from which the word "angel" derives. In the scriptures, angels have appeared to Abraham, Jacob, Lot, Daniel, Zechariah, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and to those at Jesus’ tomb on the morning of the Resurrection. Angels have spoken to prophets, closed the mouths of lions, forced a donkey off their path (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 chapter 3 of the Book of Genesis. The Seraphim – whom Isaiah describes as having “six wings: with two they covered their faces, 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 who, while appearing as separate beings, have been understood in strands of the Jewish mystical tradition as the modes through which God, who is infinite, interacts with the finite world. So their names are attributes of God: Raphael literally means "God heals"; Gabriel means "the strength of God"; Uriel- "the Light of God"--and so on. It is mythology. It is beautiful. And it is true!
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.”
In the Genesis story, echoed in Saint John’s Gospel, Jacob’s dream shows us a liminal space, an edge that shades into another space. In Celtic spirituality it is called a “thin place”. In the three-tiered universe of the scriptures, the spiritual realm was up in the sky and the realm of evil and death was “down”. The significance of the angels ascending and descending is a way of describing a connection between the unseen, spiritual “above”, the realm of eternity, and the tangible world, the realm of time, space and matter. The ladder is Christ, through whom the angels connect the finite with the Infinite, linking and maintaining a continual exchange between realms. And this continual exchange between realms, which we actually access through prayer and contemplation, is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of our hearts and our world.
The story from Revelation reminds us that we are part of an eternal drama that is described in metaphorical language yet also says something concrete about our world and our lives. While there are angels continually climbing up and down the ladder, which is Christ, the dragon and his angels 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 intentions 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 names four “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 “fruits 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 in his book “No Man Is an Island”, “is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.” So, as our beloved the late 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 so 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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