Angels of God - The Bible, the Church and the Heavenly Hosts

THE EVERYWHERE OF ANGELS

So proclaims the sweatshirt of the lady who gives me Communion when I go to Mass at a parish near my home. The shirt is oversized, sky blue, with a flock of Victorian angels flitting about the ornate, glittery lettering of the message.

There was a time in my life when I would have found every detail of that shirt annoying—from the depiction of the angels, who look a lot like the sugarplum fairies in my kids’ storybooks, to the exclamation point at the end of the slogan, which violates my every sense of journalistic and theological decorum. But now, for me, that shirt is a prayer. And this book is, in a sense, an amen, my confession of faith.

How did I get from there to here? It’s a difficult story to tell, and I’ll come to it in a minute.

Our first order of business, though, should be that slogan: Angels are everywhere!

Indeed they are. And I’m not talking just about their commercial exploitation. Yes, we’ve survived the decades when pop culture felt it necessary to remind us that angels were not only “in America” but also “in the architecture” and even “in the outfield.” One author claimed that 10 percent of all popular songs of the 1950s–1980s mentioned angels. I haven’t checked the Billboard charts myself, but I find no reason to doubt his point. In my childhood home the radio was always on, and I thank God I had catechism classes to offset the strange theological suggestions of titles like “Earth Angel,” “Teen Angel,” “Angel Baby” and “Undercover Angel,” not to mention the dubious metaphysics of “Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel.”

Angels are everywhere in film and music, and that alone can be a turnoff. Hollywood tends to trivialize angels the way it trivializes sex, reducing something profoundly spiritual to a mere curiosity before mass-producing it into an inescapable nuisance —as irritating as an unforgettable advertising jingle. Our temptation is to lose interest in the subject entirely, to dismiss the study of angels as a pastime of flakey New Age types or very sweet coworkers who also collect unicorns and rainbow sun catchers. It’s then that we wince at the sight of an “Angels are everywhere!” sweatshirt.

But we mustn’t allow Hollywood and Madison Avenue to win in this way. I say this not because angels are sensitive beings who will be hurt by our ingratitude but because angels are a large part of reality and, as with other large parts of reality—speeding Mack trucks, for example, or looming brick walls—we benefit greatly from their service, and we ignore them at our peril.

The truth is that angels are everywhere, and I’d like us to spend this book pondering the many ways that statement is true. First, though, let’s consider some that should be obvious to us but perhaps are not.

Angels are everywhere in Scripture. We find angels from the first pages of Genesis to the last pages of Revelation, and not just as bit players. They play crucial roles in the drama of our creation, fall and salvation.

In the beginning it is a fallen angel, in the form of a serpent, who tempts Adam and Eve. When our first parents are expelled from the Garden, God places angels at the entryway as a sign of judgment. It is an angel who stays the hand of Abraham when he is about to sacrifice Isaac. Angels watch over Moses and the Israelites as they make their exodus from Egypt and as they receive the law from God. Angels minister at the temple of Solomon. Angels deliver the word of the Lord to the prophets.

The trend continues through the New Testament. Angels announce the conception and birth of Jesus and of John the Baptist. Angels guide all sorts of people to worship at the crib of Jesus. Angels guide the Holy Family away from imminent danger. Angels minister to Jesus when he’s fasting in the desert and when he’s suffering in the garden. Angels watch at his empty tomb and accompany him at his ascension, announcing his glory as at his birth. Angels accompany the apostles as they establish the Church of Christ. The book of Revelation and the Letter to the Hebrews show us that angels are continually at work in our Church and in our world.

Angels are everywhere in our prayer. In the Mass two of the most beloved prayers are songs that, according to Scripture, mankind learned from the angels: the Gloria (Luke 2:13–14: “Glory to God in the highest!”) and the Sanctus (Isaiah 6:2–3: “Holy, holy, holy!”). The Church often invokes the heavenly host at the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer: “And so, with all the choirs of angels in heaven / we proclaim your glory / and join in their unending hymn of praise.”1 In the great prayer itself, the priest asks God that “your angel may take this sacrifice / to your altar in heaven.”2

And angelic prayer is hardly something we reserve for Sunday Mass. Catholics imitate and invoke the angels in many of the devotions that have been popular through the centuries. When we pray the Hail Mary, we are praying the words that the angel spoke to the Blessed Virgin, as they are recorded in Saint Luke’s Gospel (see Luke 1:28). When we offer the traditional noontime prayer, the Angelus, we recall that very story of the Annunciation to Mary. For more than a century now, the popes have encouraged recitation of certain prayers to Saint Michael the Archangel.

Angels are everywhere in Scripture, everywhere in our Christian worship, everywhere in sacred Tradition. We find them there at the heart of the faith, attending to the Holy Trinity and the Holy Family and to us. That’s the place that God gave them in divine revelation. That’s the place that Jesus gave them in his preaching and earthly life. If we relegate them to the periphery, we are distorting the faith, for we are not living it as we received it but as we prefer it to be. If we are ashamed of the angels who love us and serve us—and whom God has given to us!—should we not expect them to be ashamed of us at our judgment?

The story of the angels did not come to an end as John wrote the last words of the book of Revelation. Their mission and ministry go on. Whether we acknowledge them or not, these mysterious creatures are omnipresent in our lives, from the first moments of our conception to our last ebbing breath. They are active in our prayer, in our choices, in the order of the Church and in the order of our world. And as in the Bible, so in our lives, they are not bit players. They play crucial roles in our personal dramas.

ANGELIC ENCOUNTERS

I confess, though, that I did not always give them their due. Not so long ago I kept the angels on a remote reservation in my spiritual life. I would never deny their existence, because I knew that the doctrine of angels was well established in Tradition and nonnegotiable. But I wanted to make sure that no one suspected me of trafficking with the angels of pop culture (and some popular devotion). It hardly seemed intelligent—and it certainly seemed unmanly—to be hanging around with Victorian sprites and cherubic fairies.

Then something happened. Two close friends of mine—a man and a woman, both of them models of Christian life for me—were diagnosed with terminal cancer. As their diseases progressed, I spent countless hours with them, first on drives to chemo and in waiting rooms, then in hospital suites and finally at bedside vigils.

And I noticed something. As their bodies wasted away, both friends began to mention the angels more often in conversation. It was all very casual, as if angelic presence was as ordinary a topic as eating lunch or paying the electric bill.

I wondered why, back then, and I still do. As I reflect on the experience, it occurs to me that angels are like us in some ways and unlike us in other, very important ways. They are persons, just as we are, and so they are conscious and capable of love and moral choice. Unlike us, however, the angels are pure spirits. We humans are spiritual beings but not exclusively spiritual. We are composite, made up of a spiritual soul and a material body. Death comes for us when the soul is separated from the body. As that separation is imminent, at least for devout souls, our own “spirituality” must become more evident, and so our kinship with the angels.

As my friends entered the last stages of cancer, and even as they drifted from consciousness, invocations of the angels, especially Saint Michael, came more frequently to their lips. Death is never pretty, but bodily suffering is only part of the trial and is sometimes accompanied by tremendous spiritual struggle—spiritual warfare. It became clear to me, through the witness of my friends, that the angels are indeed fighting beside us in these battles.

Reflecting a bit further, I recognized that the battle is not reserved for the end of earthly life. It’s raging now. You and I are the battleground, and we are the spoils of war. For us to ignore the angels would be a sign not only of disordered pride but of colossal stupidity.

Why did God make angels?

One reason appears to be that they are our guardians and guides. Even though they are far stronger than we are and far more intelligent than we are, they live to serve us. By their ministry to you and...