Thoughts to Ponder - St. Michael and All Angels

On September 29^th the Church celebrates the feast of St Michael and all Angels - Michael traditionally being the most senior or Arch-angel, charged with welcoming souls to heaven. His task is expressed in the Negro spiritual “Michael, row the boat ashore….Alleluia!”

I’ve asked one or two people this week what they knew about angels. Each spoke of the figures we see at Christmas with shimmering clothes and wings -ready for take-off to (presumably) heaven! That made me think what could be meant by the mention of angels in our weekly Eucharistic prayer and in the New Testament. In the ancient world angels were seen as messengers between earth and heaven, linking the visible with the invisible. They were difficult to represent, and were depicted as humans with wings, hovering beneath heaven but above earth!

Their function was both the transmission of the words and will of God, as well as concern and care for the individual soul. The Celts believed that every soul had its guardian angel, and there may well be a link between that and the role of the anamachara or soul-friend - a person of discretion and discernment with whom one had a close, consistent, confidential relationship, with its focus on growth into maturity of faith and with the potential for transformation and individual empowerment.

I begin to see what the Quakers call ‘promptings’ as coming close to expressing the symbolism of angels. I call them ‘nudges’, but suspect they reflect the same experiences! The danger nowadays may be that we become desensitised to them, what the late Archbishop Ramsay called ‘souls starved by activism’, of forgetting who we are…. I like the possibility that, given half a chance, we can connect at the depth of our being with a reality beyond definition.

Our weekly Eucharist provides the liturgy through which we celebrate that. The celebrant’s words express what is almost inexpressible about new life, new relationship, a new creation. We take bread as a sign of our involvement, in solidarity with ‘angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven’, as well as with all those who ever have - or who ever will -  share the same longing to know what it means to glimpse the wonder and the mystery of God.

Mary McMahon