Angels and Messengers

What is Peace? Does it exist now? Will it ever? What are the obstacles to getting everyone on the planet to believe that world peace is possible? I don’t know about you, but, regardless of the current state of peace in the world, I still choose to believe that peace is a possibility.

What is Justice? Does it exist now? Will it ever? What would it take for society to believe that every person deserves justice and respect?

 
Again, I don’t know about you, but, regardless of the current state of justice in the world, I still dream of a time when every person will be treated with dignity and respect.

What is love? Imagine a world where love is unconditional.

Good readers, I believe that we must always strive to imagine a better world and never back away from the big questions. But we often get impatient with the slow progress that our institutions make.

If you feel this way, please know that you are not alone.

And yet we must keep an open mind because the fruit of our imagination is not so much what we can bring about by sheer willpower as it is about what we believe and hope for in the world around us: a better, more peaceful, just, and respectful world— a world in which people reach for higher purpose.

And this gives rise to the question of angels. Do we believe in angels? Are they real? Who or what are they? Where do they come from? Are they real? Can we see them? Are they human?

We have all heard about angles: Christmas angles, guardian angels, heavenly angels, clarion angels, Angels for Allison (http://www.stmarksjacksonville.org/angelsforallison).

What I do know is that the word “angel” means messenger, a being that is supposed to help us. Unfortunately, Christian artists through the centuries misrepresented the idea of the messenger. They painted angels using human forms, sometimes with wings and swords and dazzling costumes. This led many to dismiss angels, in sort of the same way that we now dismiss unicorns or even (dare I say it) griffins.

If this is what angels are not, then what might they be? As we have already heard, the word “angel” simply means messenger. In that sense, angels very definitely do exist. When Ghandi said, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world,” he was saying, be an angel, be a messenger, be an agent of goodness. Angels sit by a sick child’s bed all night with a message of love and security. They come and go from a dying grandparent’s hospital bed with a message of comfort and appreciation. Just the other day a teacher was running with his dog along a cornfield when he came across two students, one of them injured and unable to run. They had come to a crossroads and did not know where to turn so they took the path to the right, and that is where they ran into the teacher. Did an angel point the way, or was that teacher, perhaps, the messenger because he ran to back to school to get help and took them back?

Tradition tells us that there are lots of angels, and that they are almost always healthful. Of the many angels spoken of in the Bible, only four are mentioned by name: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. In Hebrew, Michael means "who is like God." Michael is mentioned three times in the Book of Daniel, once as a "great prince who stands up for the children of your people". In the New Testament Michael leads God's armies against Satan's forces in the Book of Revelation. During the summer before my final year of college, I had to read the long poem Paradise Lost by the 17th century poet John Milton, an epic concerning the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the angelic wars that ensued thereafter. It was the Star Wars of its day—before 20^th Century Fox or Disney/DreamWorks.

Finally, Michaelmas, the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, is the day I am writing about today. It is a day in the Western Christian calendar which occurs at the end of September. Because it falls near the equinox, it is associated in the northern hemisphere with the beginning of autumn, the shortening of days, and the harvest of God’s abundant love.

This connection of Michael to the kindness of God and the end of days reminds us that angels are messengers of kindness, order, justice, healing and the light of charity that leads to a rich and rewarding destiny.