ANGELS EVERYWHERE
Voice of the Day:
“Angels Everywhere” from “The Universal Christ” by Richard Rohr
“An angel, (theologian Walter) Wink believed, is the inner spirit or soul of a thing. When we honor the “angel” or soul of a thing, we respect its inner spirit. And if we learn how to pay attention to the soul of things—to see the “angels” of elements, animals, the earth, water, and skies—then we can naturally work our way back through the Great Chain of Being to the final link, whom many call God. Don’t waste your time deconstructing your primitive belief about pretty, winged creatures in flowing pastel dresses. If you do so, you are seriously missing out on what they are pointing to. We need to reconstruct, and not just continue to deconstruct. Then you will see angels everywhere.”
The Angel Gabriel visits Zechariah in the Temple: Luke 1, selected verses from “The Message” by Eugene Peterson
5-7 During the rule of Herod, King of Judea, there was a priest assigned service in the regiment of Abijah. His name was Zachariah. His wife was descended from the daughters of Aaron. Her name was Elizabeth. Together they lived honorably before God, careful in keeping to the ways of the commandments and enjoying a clear conscience before God. But they were childless because Elizabeth could never conceive, and now they were quite old.
8-12 It so happened that as Zachariah was carrying out his priestly duties before God,….it came his one turn in life to enter the sanctuary of God and burn incense. The congregation was gathered and praying outside the Temple at the hour of the incense offering. Unannounced, an angel of God appeared just to the right of the altar of incense. Zachariah was paralyzed in fear.
13-15 But the angel reassured him, “Don’t fear, Zachariah. Your prayer has been heard. Elizabeth, your wife, will bear a son by you. You are to name him John. You’re going to leap like a gazelle for joy, and not only you—many will delight in his birth. He’ll achieve great stature with God.
18 Zachariah said to the angel, “Do you expect me to believe this? I’m an old man and my wife is an old woman.”
19-20 But the angel said, “I am Gabriel, the sentinel of God, sent especially to bring you this glad news. But because you won’t believe me, you’ll be unable to say a word until the day of your son’s birth. Every word I’ve spoken to you will come true on time—God’s time.”
Reflection: Angels Everywhere
I want to acknowledge the source for many of the ideas and quotes in this service: “Angels Everywhere: Prayer Bench Advent Pathway”, an Advent email series by Janice MacLean. Janice writes The Prayer Bench, an online ministry with a contemplative focus, and I have been fortunate enough to attend a retreat with her at Bethlehem Centre in Nanaimo and a couple of online workshops.
I imagine that I am one of many United Church folk who haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about angels. But angels are a huge part of our spiritual and cultural consciousness. According to a recent poll, almost 7/10 people in the US believe angels are real. But there is a huge variety in the images and stories that each one of us brings to our angel understanding.
Some of us believe that we become angels when we die. Some of us believe that we have a personal guardian angel that protects and guides us. Angel statues hover over our graves and angels top our Christmas trees.
It was the Richard Rohr quote above that really piqued my interest in angels this Advent. Walter Wink’s idea is that an angel is the inner spirit or soul of a thing, and if we pay attention to that spirit we can work our way back to the divine, to the ground of our being.
There are a lot of angels in the Advent and Christmas stories. The angels in the Bible are messengers, divine emissaries going back and forth in the thin space between heaven and earth. Our word “angel” comes from the Greek “Angelos” which means messenger. The angels tell us to watch, to ask, to dwell in the thin places, to be open to mystery. Their messages come from the heart of God to the heart of Earth.
In the passage about Gabriel’s visit to Zechariah, his initial response to the angel is one of fear. Perhaps it was the suddenness of Gabriel’s arrival. Zechariah is performing a priestly duty that he will only do once in his entire life, and suddenly a stranger is standing beside the altar. No wonder he was startled!
That is often at the root of our own fearfulness: the sudden appearance in our lives of something totally unexpected. Sometimes the unexpected is also completely unwelcome: we live lives of relative privilege and security, but we can still be faced with a sudden accident, a serious illness, loss of employment or housing. Or we might receive good news, like Zechariah’s news of an unplanned pregnancy, but it catches us completely off guard.
And like Zechariah, in our fear we may want to reject or argue with the messenger, to blame him or her for the unwelcome news.
Or, again like Zechariah, our denial may result from the way our lives are disrupted by the message we receive, even if the news itself is good news. Zechariah is a man of power and prestige, a priest in the very act of performing the one ritual that he will never again have the chance to perform. Why is he being bothered now by news of an impending birth that is completely impossible? Who can blame Zechariah for saying, “Do you expect me to believe this? I’m an old man and my wife is an old woman.”
Who can blame us for saying, when we first hear unexpected news, “Don’t be ridiculous! Everything is going so well right now, don’t tell me things have to change. Don’t ask me to deal with something I’m just not prepared for. Leave me alone!”
The angel Gabriel brings the message that Biblical angels always bring, “Don’t be afraid.” Every single angel in the Christmas stories begins their message with those words. If an angel says “don’t be afraid”, maybe we should listen.
Gabriel is stern as well as comforting: he reinforces his credentials and enforces consequences. He is a messenger from God, after all, and because Zechariah does not believe him he won’t be able to speak until the baby is born.
What are we to make of the silence that Gabriel imposes on Zechariah? In our world of words, words and more words, 9 month of silence sounds like punishment. 9 months without being able to share our thoughts, our joys, our sorrows, our questions? 9 months of listening to others without being able to respond? And what would it mean for a priest, whose life revolves around prayers and petitions?
The surprise is that Zechariah’s 9 months of silence turns into a gift rather than a punishment. For 9 months he is alone with his pregnant wife, his thoughts, and his God, pondering the meaning of what is happening to them. His silence mirrors his wife’s pregnancy, a turning inward, a time of growth and nurturing, a time of preparation for the birth of their unexpected child.
The angels ask us, as Gabriel asked Zechariah, to watch, to ask, to dwell in the thin places, to be open to mystery.
If we watch for angels, we won’t be surprised. There are angels everywhere. If we ask, we will hear the message clearly. If we dwell in silence in the thin space, we will have the time to process that message fully.
In silence, we hear the angel messages that we miss in the middle of all the conversations that make up our daily lives. Silence makes room in our heads to hear God’s voice and God’s message. Sometimes if we are too quick to share our news, good or bad, we miss the opportunity for God to teach us at the deep, heart level what it really means for us.
In the Gospels, angels continue to bring unexpected news, unexpected commands, to Mary, to Joseph, and to the lowly shepherds. None of these are important people in the eyes of the world, as Zechariah was. A young Galilean girl, her bewildered fiancé, and the most humble of agricultural workers. All of them are part of a bigger story, the story of divinity permeating humanity, the erasing of the barriers between Creator and Creation. Each of them is only given one piece of the puzzle, but when all the pieces are in place a new reality emerges.
Finally, these stories ask us to be open to mystery.
I’d like to close with some stories quoted by Janice MacLean:
In the Celtic imagination, Saint Brigid was the midwife at the birth of Christ. An old Irish story tells that angels flew Brigid from Ireland to Bethlehem that night. Storyteller Martin Shaw says, “This is a strange thought within strange thoughts, but she may simply have walked into a Connacht hill and found herself in the stable. The deep mind accepts this.”
Here is another story about angels from Celtic tradition.
John Philip Newell, a Celtic writer, familiar with the Isle of Iona tells the story of how St Columba liked to pray on a hill… as the great fire of the sun dipped into the Atlantic.
On one occasion a young brother in the monastic community secretly followed the abbot at sunset to see what it was that Columba did in his evening practice of prayer. The young monk, perched on a hillock at the edge of the Glen of the Fairies, saw that as Columba prayed there were angels of light descending and ascending on him.
Janice continues, In the Celtic world these messengers of light are everywhere present.
I am no longer quick to dismiss angels. Perhaps angels come into the lives of humanity in many shapes and forms… Angels might be that tug to the heart, that vivid dream, that whirling energy in all things, that invisible hand.
I don’t think angels exist just to make us “feel good” or to send oracles to determine our future. We are probably less often rescued by angels than we are disturbed by them…
Perhaps, for me, the mystic Howard Thurman says it best: “There must be always remaining in every one’s life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and, by an inherent prerogative, throws all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness, something that gathers up in itself all the freshest of experience from drab to commonplace areas of living and glows in on bright white light of penetrating beauty and meaning —then passes.”
May you find space for silence and for singing with the angels this blessed Advent, Solstice and Christmastide.
So might it be. Amen.
For Reflection
Who or what are the angel voices in your life?
What is their message?
