Powers Unseen

For Catholics, this is a week, every year, to be reminded of the angels. Monday was the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael – a day spent honoring those spectacular archangels, of grave power and beauty, who surround the Heavenly Throne. And today marks the Feast of the Guardian Angels, those astonishing creatures whose care for those entrusted to them is a marvel in God’s order of creation.

We’re “reminded” of them because we do, indeed, forget. This wasn’t always so: throughout the history of the faith, in all the centuries of the Church, saints, theologians, and also just plain folks were aware of the existence and role of the angels (and demons). People’s minds were awake to these unseen beings influencing their lives for good or evil. Protecting or tempting. Providing ballasts in the truth or uttering punishing lies. Influencing one way or the other, in ways that made a real difference to the way people acted, discerned decisions, and made their choices.

We’re not so alive to those dynamics, anymore. Our modern minds are reticent to think much of the spiritual world at all. Consciously or unconsciously, we tend to relegate that stuff to the land of superstition or quaint folk stories, left over from the days when science and technology had not yet revealed to us the material causes of everything. Or, it’s a space that we just don’t have time to attend to. Our “real life” presses in upon us, filled with all the cares of family and money and career. We’re obsessed with what we can see and touch and feel, as a result – it’s reliable and manipulable, after all, and it makes up the realm in which we’re employed, or married, or going to school, or pulling together a livelihood.

Of course, to the Christian mind, that’s a dangerous imaginative zone to occupy exclusively. The most urgent aspects of our lives are the realities we can’t see – God, and our human souls. The near-sightedness that makes up the modern spiritual malaise can therefore put us in mortal danger. Our lives on earth are just a blip compared to the eternal destiny that awaits us in that unseen realm we so often forget. And yet we do, in fact, forget.

The angels are many things for Christians. They are fierce protectors, noble messengers, mighty worshippers of God, and astounding warriors. They’re also keys to the heart of reality. They’re signs of that invisible world we’re meant to be fully ushered into when we come into the fullness of our being and see them, and the Almighty God, face to face. So let’s ask these stunning creatures for their help and protection today. Let’s ask them to keep our lives attuned to those realities on which our destiny depends. And let’s ask them as if they really are alive, as if they’re really there to answer us.