How About Those Angels
“Angels
often appear out of nowhere at just the right time.”
Thomas
Moore (The Soul of Christmas, p.85, Franciscan Media, 2016)
In the
Christmas story as reported in the Gospel of Luke, second chapter, we're told that while shepherds tended their sheep in the fields, an angel appeared to them with the news of Jesus’ birth in a barn in the City
of David. The only description of the angel is that it shone with “the glory of
the Lord.” It is we who give the angel a human shape with wings. After the
message was delivered, the angel was joined by “a heavenly host,” who said, “Glory
to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men.”
When we
retell this story every year, children march into the sanctuary with staffs and
robes, wings, and halos, we assure ourselves that this is pretty much the scene
as it occurred to those shepherds two-thousand years ago. Truth is, we do not
know what angels look like, or even is they are visible at all. We simply have
difficulty believing that anything from the heavenly realm does not look like
us.
Most of
us have encountered angels in human form—the guy in overalls who literally
lifted the front of my car out of a ditch comes to mind. I remember a client
once telling me that she and her sister had a terrible car accident that threw the
sister through the windshield and onto the road, with the car flipped on top of
her. My client, despite a broken leg, climbed out of the upside-down
car, rushed to her sister, and lifted the car off her body. That sounds
super-human to me. In that moment of having her life saved, I’ll bet the sister
felt she had been visited by an angel.
Thomas
Moore reports that the medieval philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, spoke of angels as
“separate beings.” He explains that angels are real, but they inhabit a
different realm or reality from ours. When we are saved by some quirk of fate, in almost magical circumstances, it may be because an angel has intervened on
our behalf. Moore says, “Angels do the will of God and serve a person’s
destiny.” If we have an assignment here on earth, we may experience a miraculous
encounter that leaves us struggling to understand why we survived when others
didn’t. I think about that when I read about one member of a family not
contracting Covid when the rest of the family has died from it.
The
Christmas story, from the annunciation to the birth of the “star child” is full
of angels. They deliver news from God in all situations. I guess nowadays God relies
on Social Media like the rest of us, but back then, God used angels to
communicate.
Thomas Moore
recommends that we take angels seriously, and so do I. I think they still break
through and inform us when we need it most. Until we finish whatever it is that we
are here on earth to do, or be, our guardian angel watches over us—remember they
are responsible for helping us fulfill our destiny. They won’t intervene in our
everyday difficulties, our personality quirks, or our interpersonal messes, but
they will keep us on track. They will open doors or slam them in our faces if
need be; they put people we need to meet in our path, and they bless us with
all manner of experience and opportunity until our job here is done.
Your
angel is invested in you, just as Jesus’ angels were in him. You can call upon
them whenever you want. You may not see them since they abide in a different
reality, but you will know when you have been touched by one. These are
powerful beings. Remember the shepherds were “greatly afraid.” It’s something to
think about as we approach 2021. We could use a little angelic intervention right
about now. Let’s ask them for help.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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