Right before the Lord’s Prayer, my community offers the “Litany of Supplication.” One of the supplications is this: “For an angel of peace, a faithful guide, a guardian of our souls and bodies, let us pray to the Lord.”
It’s prettier in our old language: “Anhela mira, v’irna nastavnika, chranitel’a dušam i t’ilom našim, u Hospoda prosim.”
I think that outside the Orthodox, Catholic, and other traditional communities, there is no such equivalent prayer in the worship service. I grew up as an evangelical protestant, and I’m quite certain we never offered any such prayer on Sunday morning.
In general, there isn’t much attention given to angels in sermons or articles. Unfortunately, this may be true of the Orthodox community as well.
This is a shame. Angels have always been a crucial part of Orthodox doctrine. Over time, especially in the modern era, “angelology” (yes, there is such a thing) has fallen into neglect — despite the fact that Old Testament prophets, New Testament apostles and Church fathers have said much about the “incorporeal powers.” Moreover, we refer to them repeatedly in our divine services and prayers.
It would be necessary to get back to traditional “angelology” if only because it is part of the Apostolic proclamation.
But it is even more important now, because this moment — as in Fall and Winter of 2019 — cries out for the “rumor of angels” and an awareness of “entertaining angels unawares” (Hebrews 13.2) -- a critical moment when, as Lincoln once said, we pine for "the angels of our better nature."
We are in a crisis moment when people -- left and right -- are more likely to be molded by events, demagogues, and anxieties rather than molding events by their good character: human persons are created to happen to time, rather than time happening to individuals. I’m afraid that the main reason for this decline of human character is that we have lulled ourselves into thinking that we live in a material, angel-less world -- a worldview that is cardboard and superficial, compared with the real Creation that is of enormous, beautiful physical and metaphysical depth.
Any visitor from the pre-modern age, if he had the misfortune of showing up these days by some sort of time machine, would probably be shockingly unimpressed with our culture. We’d show him -- proudly -- our cable TV with hundreds of channels, our cellphone with constant contact with anyone in the world 24/7, our dizzying array of consumer choices in the grocery and the online stores, our amazing entertainments and celebrities and adventures, and especially our glorious internet that opens an ever broader vista of possibilities.
Our ancient visitor would be not only unimpressed, but totally distressed. “But your world is so flat!” he might say. “Oh you poor thing,” we respond, “Of course you think the earth is flat, but in this age of science, we know better.”
“No, no,” he protests, “We’ve known that Terra is spherical for centuries .... I mean, your mental world is so terribly small: you know nothing of the larger, metaphysical world. You know so little about angels.”
And with that, our visitor from the Christendom of fourteenth century Byzantine Empire or Western Europe would sit us down somewhere outside, in a grove of trees, under the rustling autumn leaves.
He’d take a deep breath, and talk of angels.
He’d say that there are vastly more angels than the entire population of humanity from the beginning of time to its end. That the nine ranks of angels are the created reflections -- or, as the Fathers say, “second suns” -- of the uncreated Divine Nature. That the highest ranks of the angels -- the Cherubim and the Seraphim -- receive the greatest knowledge of God and pass it down the angelic hierarchy all the way, finally, to humanity.
Here we get a little hot and bothered because we moderns do not like hearing about hierarchy or order. We like everything democratic and convenient and untroubling. We want everything and everyone flat, on the same playing field.
Our old friend stares at us with a look that starts in surprise then turns into pity. “Oh, I see,” he says. “This is what your philosophy has done to you.”
“But we don’t like philosophy,” we protest, “We don’t have any of that. We’re only practical.”
He sighs again, at the painful irony of it all. It turns out that the whole hierarchy of Creation is a hierarchy of servanthood, of self-sacrifice. The entire angelic order “dies to self,” he says, for the sake of love for heaven and earth, and especially of the heart of Creation, which is humanity.
Then his voice softens and becomes hushed. “The angels are this way because they reflect the fact that the Trinity is just this way, the Divine Nature itself. The Father gives Himself away to the Sonship of the Word and the Procession of the Spirit. They, in turn, surrender Themselves completely to the revelation of the Father.
“And,” he pauses, closing his eyes, as if to hear his thoughts more closely, “the only word we have for that mysterious act of surrender is prayer.”
This, he says, is exactly what the angels reflect throughout the universe. There is no place, no moment, without their radiance of being “second suns.” There is no such thing as being “alone with God” without anyone else around. “You are always in higher company,” he says: “That is the real Christian philosophy ... there is no alone with the alone.”
"But we already know about God's grace, about His energy," we protest, trying, for the last time, to protect our modern advantage.
"His love in Creation is never un-accompanied by His second suns." Our visitor was showing signs of wear: the task of translating a very non-contemporary theology into modern speech was taxing. "That is how the angelic assembly is so, well, immediate in your here-and-now."
“The angels are all around you," he went on, "bearing the Cross, serving you, constantly expressing, in their beautiful and total self-sacrificial artistry, the unending glories of divine wisdom.”
He continues. Everything in Creation, he says, is watched over by angelic ministry. “There is a power or principality that expresses the transcendental number pi, or e, or even the Golden Mean. There is a dominion that superintends the Planck Constant, another for the speed of light, and for each of the twenty constants you know about and all the others you know nothing about.”
He goes on, despite the obvious fact that his audience is feeling incompetent, too deep in, way over their heads: “If you think about it, it should occur to you that Christian philosophy has corrected and enhanced Plato’s notion of the world of Ideas. Instead of Ideas, there are, in reality, Angels. Instead of abstract theories, there are personal ministers of divine light.”
We shake our heads, having forgotten that there is such a thing as “Christian philosophy.” Clearly, we were mistaken as to who is enlightened, and who is not.
“I’m sure you’re familiar with the one hundred and forty-seventh Psalm,” he went on, seeing that we are by now quite out of sorts, “He shall heal the shattered in heart, He shall bind up all their wounds. He measures the multitude of stars, calling each one of them by name.”
He whispers: “Don’t you understand that that each name is an angel? Divine Love is accompanied by angels everywhere, from the edge of the universe to the human heart?”
“I’m going to leave you in a moment,” he says as he gets up, brushing dust off his red philosopher’s cloak. “This has been, err, interesting, but frankly your modern enlightened society is giving me a smashing headache.”
“But before I go, I’ll leave you with this. Of all the angels, the ones most important to you, the ones you must know about right now, are the lowest ones … the ones closest to you. And by now you should know that their being the lowest rank in the hierarchy should not trouble you in the least.”
Closest to our experience are the Guardian Angels. Even though the entire angelic assembly takes on guardianship of the physical creation and humanity, as its heart, it is the ninth and lowest, the ones we know by name, that are explicitly known as “Guardian.” There are guardian angels for nations, like the Archangel Michael for the historic people of God. There are angels for churches, as seen in the first chapters of St John’s Apocalypse.
But in particular, every human has a Guardian Angel, whose entire task is to help us become utterly transformed by divine love: “See that you do not despise one of these little ones,” the Lord said in Matthew 18.10, “for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.”
“Your guardian, your heavenly custodian, was assigned to you long before you were ever conceived, long before, even, the physical universe was created. Your Guardian Angel was waiting for you, and now he prays for you and serves you and waits upon you … just to help you become what you should become.”
“What’s that?” we call out, as he starts to disappear in that Star-Trek-like shimmer of a transporter beam. “Powerful? Successful? Pretty? Ever-young? Comfortable?”
We finally call, “Saved?”
From a distant echo, we hear his last words: “Real.” Then silence.
The Divine Love of the Holy Trinity is the very basis of all reality. Your guardian angel, whom you will see one day, is simply trying to help make you Real -- or, to put it another way, more congruent with the way things really should be, rather than the way things have gone awry.
We would do well to make friends with our better angels.
Things have gone awry, and that’s for sure. But the way things should be -- a "hyper-reality” of God giving Himself away for us, and our giving ourselves away for our weaker neighbors and thus to Christ, and the angels helping all along the way -- this way of love still remains, and obtains.
It’s a good thing our better angels remember this -- just because they behold the face of the Father -- even when we might not.
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