I believe in Angels

Today is a good day to ask: ‘Do you believe in angels?’ Today is the day that the Church remembers ‘St Michael and all Angels’.

On the one hand, there is a voice inside me, a very rational, sophisticated voice, which says that belief in angels is not a good idea. Angels are a throwback to a more superstitious age when religious people felt a need to populate the earth with imaginary beings. Just think of the elaborate speculations by medieval theologians as they classified and codified angels and argued over how many could dance on a pinhead. I hear myself saying, ‘Let’s keep our eyes on Jesus and not clutter our minds, piling up beliefs and added extras that add little to the faith.’

However, another voice wants to say, ‘Not so fast’. The idea of angels shows up across all cultures, time periods and religions. Angels are part of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought. However sceptical we might be about angels in medieval thought, and however trivialised and sentimental angels may seem as portrayed in today’s culture, angels still have a central part to play in in our lives as Christians.

The more I think about it, and the more I listen to this inner struggle, the more that second voice makes sense to me. Angels are messengers of God, and the idea of angels is necessary within a belief system that starts with God as a divine mystery. It is the very transcendence of God that makes the idea of angels necessary - these spiritual beings that serve as ‘go-betweens’ between God and humanity, who speak for God and are sent by God to communicate and connect with the human race.

Jacob’s dream of a ladder between earth and heaven on which angels descend and ascend gives us a powerful image of this ongoing interchange between the earthly and heavenly realms, between the ordinary world of solid matter, reason and logic, and the divine world that is beyond human perception and thought. Angels symbolise the way that the divine mystery we call ‘God’ is continuously interacting with us, constantly inviting and challenging, protecting and accompanying us. When our eyes are opened to this interplay of worlds, the interweaving of the human and divine, then, like Jacob, we too awaken from sleep and say, ‘surely the Lord is in this place…. This is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven.’

Today’s Gospel reading goes even further. Jesus Christ is what we might term our ‘ladder’ to heaven. As he says to Nathaniel, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ In other words, through the incarnation, Jesus has caught up in his very body the fullness of God and the fullness of humanity. He is the meeting place, the point of intersection, the place where earth and heaven, the human and the divine, meet and are woven into one. We live in a sacramental world. So, welcoming angels into our imagination is a way of welcoming Jesus himself, a way of opening ourselves to the infinite ways that we receive messages from God.

With that in mind, I wonder how you notice messages from God? Maybe you tend to sense the message internally, from intuition or vision, from a dream or sudden insight that catches your attention and speaks to you a word from God. Maybe a friend shows up on your doorstep at just the right moment or calls you on the phone when you were thinking about that person. Maybe the natural world touches your soul on a cliff-top walk and you are immersed within it?

You might call such moments ‘angel moments’. Why not? To the logical, analytical mind such moments may have no particular value, meaning or usefulness, but to the soul they give a glimpse of what it means to live life in a larger way, to be awake and responsive to the holy mystery all around us, and to live with a spirit of love rather than fear.

Despite the sophisticated voice of ‘reason’, I know that I do cherish angels. Why? Well, it’s because welcoming angels keeps us attentive to the mysterious ways in which God meets us in the daily moments of our lives; it’s because they keep our imagination alive in a world that tends to squash our sensibilities and makes everything drab, as if the material world is all there is; it’s because, as Howard Thurman, a minister and civil rights leader, once suggested, there is a place in everybody’s life for angels, a beautiful place where despite the difficulties of life, the singing of angels can be found, and transformation is possible. No wonder we can’t keep from singing with ‘angels and archangels and all the company of heaven’.

Every blessing,

Christian