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May 2000/2
The Angels and Growth in the Spiritual Life
I. INTRODUCTION
I am sending an angel before you, to guard you on the way and bring you to the place I have prepared. Be attentive to him and heed his voice. Do not rebel against him, for he will not forgive your sin. My authority resides in him. If you heed his voice and carry out all I tell you, I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes" (Ex 23:20-23).
These words of the Lord to Moses reveal to us not only the existence of a guardian and protecting angel, but also our rights and duties toward him. We are to be ‘attentive’ and obedient to him and ‘heed his voice’; otherwise ‘he will not forgive our sins.' From this brief passage then, we can see the tremendous importance that the angels can and should play in our spiritual life. For their job is to lead us from the desert of this life to the heavenly Jerusalem, just like they led the Chosen People through the desert to the Promised Land.
Now they can do this because God in his providence has decided to give us many graces through the ministry of the angels. This is an astounding reality and a truth that many people are, unfortunately, scarcely aware of. St. Thomas Aquinas, in fact, teaches that "we cannot make progress in merit except by the divine help which is given to us by means of the ministry of the angels." And St. John of the Cross states that all the good inspirations we receive "come to us from God by means of the angels." In other words, the angels help us in our ‘every good action.’ Or to put it more strongly still, we cannot do anything good without the help of the angels. And so because of this reality, Pope John Paul II has gone so far as to state that the angels carry out for us a ‘messianic ministry’ under Christ and in the service of the Church. For as the Catechism explains, not only does "the whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of the angels" (CCC 334), but also "from infancy to death human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession … Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God" (CCC 336).
It is clear, then, that the importance of the role that the angels play in our spiritual life can scarcely be overestimated. For this reason we should do everything in our power to develop a closer union with them. Now there are twelve steps, which if faithfully followed, will infallibly lead us to a greater love and devotion to the angels. St. Benedict identified twelve steps that lead to humility. St. Alphonsus Liguori found twelve steps that lead to holiness and salvation. And so we can also find twelve steps that will lead us to sanctity with the help of the angels.
II. TWELVE STEPS TO THE ANGELS AND HOLINESS
The first and most basic step is to be in the state of grace. For if we are living in the state of mortal sin, we are, in effect, an agent of the devil, as Fr. Hardon puts it. For mortal sin ruptures our relationship with the good angels and puts us in league with the bad angels. We cannot imagine, therefore, just how offensive a soul in the state of mortal sin is to the angels.
A little story from the Desert Fathers gives us some idea of how displeasing sinners are to the angels. St. Anthony of Egypt, the greatest of the desert saints in the early Church, tells us of a monk who, being one day on a trip, came upon a corpse. Now when passing it by he carefully covered his nose with his cloak, but the angel who accompanied him in the figure of a man did not even appear to notice the bad smell. Shortly after this took place, however, they met a well-dressed young man who was in the state of mortal sin. And so when he passed by, the angel held his hand over his nose. Now when the monk wondered about this, the angel explained that the bad smell of the decaying corpse did not bother him, but that the unbearable smell of a soul in the state of mortal sin was enough to drive away the whole heavenly court. For this reason St. Basil says, "Just as the smoke drives away bees, so does sin drive away the angels."
We must therefore, cultivate a very high esteem for being in the state of grace. For the angels possess the same grace that we do, but to a far higher degree. And so because of this we can say that the more we learn to treasure grace, the more we will learn to treasure the friendship of the angels.
The second step is to have a great reverence for all things sacred, especially for the Eucharist. And we know this especially from the apparitions of the angel at Fatima in 1916. For it happened there that an angel appeared to three shepherd children, holding in his hands a chalice surmounted by a host, from which some drops of blood were falling into it. And then, leaving the chalice and host suspended in the air, he prostrated himself on the ground and repeated three times the prayer: "Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I adore you profoundly. I offer you the most precious Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, present in all the tabernacles of the world, in reparation for the outrages, sacrileges and indifferences by which he is offended. And through the infinite merits of his Most Sacred Heart, and of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg the conversion of poor sinners." Now the fact that the angel of Fatima not only knelt down, but also prostrated himself till his forehead touched the ground is a lesson with what great reverence we ought to present our prayers."
We can also learn an important lesson in the ways the angels teach us reverence by studying what Sr. Lucy had to say about her experiences. She writes, "Impelled by the supernatural force that surrounded us, we imitated all that the angel had done by prostrating ourselves on the ground and repeating the prayer he said. So intensely did we feel the Presence of God that we were completely overwhelmed and absorbed by it. And it seemed that, for a considerable time, we were deprived of our bodily senses … it was like an annihilation in the Divine Presence."
The third step is to pray both with and to the angels. First of all the angels ‘ardently want us to pray with them. Each of our guardian angels, in fact, wants us to get down on our knees and pray with him. For in doing so, the Lord will be able to fulfill one of his greatest promises, which is, "wherever two or more are gathered together in my name, I am present among them."
The angels, then, were created not only for the praise of God, but also to help us to do his will. Psalm 103 reveals this reality to us with the words: "Bless the Lord, all you angels, mighty in strength and attentive, obedient to every command. Bless the Lord, all you ministers who do God’s will"(vv. 20-22).
While the Book of Revelation teaches us how the angels praise God, it says, "Worthy is the Lamb to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing," and "how the smoke of the incense (in heaven) rises with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God"(5:12; 8:4). And so because of this, Vatican II did not hesitate to state: "In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem towards which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God … with all the troops of the heavenly host" (SC 8). Now this angelic relationship that connects both liturgies is forcefully summed up in one sentence taken from the first Eucharistic Prayer of the Mass, which reads, "Almighty God, we pray that your angel may take this sacrifice to your altar in heaven."
Besides this, the prayer of the Mass teaches us that we are in the presence of an angelic society that is constantly and eternally glorifying and praising God. For example, at the beginning of Mass we confess our sins in the presence of the angels and ask them to pray for us to the Lord our God. And at the end of every Eucharistic Preface, we unite our voices to the angels in heaven when we say the prayer that the prophet Isaiah heard the angels singing in heaven which is, "Holy, holy, holy Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest."
Similarly we must pray not only with the angels but to them as well. This is what distinguishes Catholic devotion to the angels from that of the Protestants. For the Protestants, though they believe in angels and believe that God sends his angels to help us, do not believe that we can or should pray to them or ask them to help us. Even Billy Graham in his best-selling and otherwise excellent book, Angels: God’s Secret Agents, refuses to concede this point of doctrine. He holds, as do all Protestants, that God merely sends his angels in response to our prayers for help. We cannot, therefore, according to Protestant teaching, pray directly to the angels.
We Catholics know, of course, that we can pray to the angels, just like we can pray to the saints. We should then, pray regularly to our guardian angel and ask him for his help, and one of the best ways we can do this is to get into the habit of sending our angel to others in times of difficulty. Pope Pius XI frequently recommended this practice. For, as he explained, "the guardian angel can smooth out difficulties and defeat opposition." Whenever, therefore, he stressed, "we have to speak with someone who is rather closed to our arguments and with whom the conversation needs to be very persuasive we should recommend the matter to our guardian angel. And then ask him to take it up with the guardian angel of the person or persons we have to see. And so once the two angels establish an understanding, the conversation will go much easier."
By invoking the angels more frequently and fervently, then, as Pope John XXIII once recommended in an address on the highway code of Italy, we will get them "to influence the minds and wills of people, and even the power of technology, when a misguided desire to compete or to break records might be a cause of disaster … For each of us can speak to other peoples guardian angels."
The fourth step is purity. Purity, says St. Ephrem, makes us in a certain sense like the angels. "Of course there is difference," says St. Bernard, "between the pure person and the angel, but it is not a difference of virtue, but only one of happiness. For if the purity of the angels is more blessed, (we can say) that the purity of human beings is more courageous."
If we want to work with the angels, then, we must strive to be as pure as they are. For it is rightly and truly said, as St. John of the Cross points out, that all the inspirations and communications we receive from the angels come to us like rays of sunlight shining through many window panes. And so because of this, if these shining rays of divine grace, coming to us from the angel, fail to penetrate our soul, it will be because the windows of our heart are too dirty. It is not without reason, therefore, that St. Paul tells us to "cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit and make holiness perfect in the fear of God."
The fifth step is poverty of spirit. We must be emptied of our plans, projects, opinions, as well as all our vain and negative thoughts, so that the angels can fill our minds with good thoughts and teach us the best ways to carry out God’s will. For if we are full of ourselves, we cannot be filled with the Holy Spirit and the inspirations of the angels. The angels however, if we let them, will gradually point out to us how we can detach ourselves from the pleasure that tie us to the earth and will give us the strength we need to carry through on our good resolutions.
The sixth step is works of mercy. God is love, As St. John reveals to us. And God’s Son has commanded us to love him with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength and our neighbor as our self. The angels are the servants of Christ, they belong to him; for Christ, as the Catechism puts it, is the center of the angelic world. And so because of this the angels want us to be like Christ and to grow in the love of God and neighbor. For this reason we will attract their help and protection to the degree that we practice charity. This rule of the spiritual life is strikingly shown in the Book of Tobit.
Tobit himself tell us that he "walked all the days of his life on the paths of truth and righteousness;" that he "performed many charitable works for his kinsmen;" that he gave his "bread to the hungry" and his "clothing to the naked;" and so because of his many charitable deeds, when he became blind in a freak accident, his prayer for help "was heard in the glorious presence of Almighty God" and the archangel Raphael was sent to heal him (cf. Tob 1:3-18; 3:16).
The seventh step is to cultivate a love of solitude. For solitude is the habitat of the angels. They like to congregate in the desert, on mountaintops and lonely caves. This is a secret known to the early Desert Fathers who fled the city and the company of men so that they could enjoy the company of God and the blessed spirits. The Imitation of Christ sums up a basic law of the spiritual life when it says: "The more you keep away from friends and acquaintances, the more our Lord and his angels will draw near to you.
And a quick look at the Bible will verify for us that most angelic apparitions occur in solitary places. For example, an angel stayed the hand of Abraham on top of lonely Mt. Moriah when he was about to kill his son Isaac; an angel appeared to Hagar in the desert when she was out of water; and the only times the angels comforted Christ, as the Gospels tell us, was when he was in the solitude of the desert and by himself in the Garden of Gethsemane. And finally, Tradition tells us that Mary was alone in the solitude of her room in the Holy House of Nazareth when the archangel Gabriel appeared to her in order to ask her to be the Mother of God.
Now it must be stressed here that besides the solitude of the body; there is also solitude of the soul. And the latter is more necessary than the former. In other words, it is more important to have solitude of heart and soul than just being by yourself in some out of the way place. "For what advantage is it to remain quiet at home or in Church if your heart is centered on the things of earth, and the noise of these earthly things prevents us from hearing the voice of the angels?"
Silence, the practice of silence, is the eight step that will lead us to union with the angels, and it follows logically from the seventh step. For silence is the language of the angels. And so if we are always busy talking to other people we will not be able to hear the voice of the angels speaking to us. The virtue of silence, however, does not consist in never speaking but rather in keeping silent when there is no good reason to speak. For as the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, "there is time to keep silent and a time to speak" (Eccl 3:7). And so we should speak, then, only when the necessity of charity requires it.
Now the practice of silence is so essential because the angels, for the most part, do not speak to us with words. Though, of course if they want to, they can take on the appearance of a body and speak to us as one man to another. The Book of Tobit and the Acts of the Apostles clearly show us that. Primarily, however, the angels speak to each other and to us by sending thoughts. For the essence of all conversation is the will to communicate one thought to another person. We must not think, therefore, that we are somehow superior to the angels because we communicate by using speech and words. For it is actually, as Fr Hardon has pointed out, a humiliation to have to use lips and a mouth to communicate ideas.
Angels, we must be aware, "communicate to each other immediately, that is mind to mind, without any medium like air or ears or even words. In other words, they communicate to each other by ‘direct mental telepathy.’ We, on the other hand, communicate mediately, in two ways: through sensible things, such as pictures or audible sounds and through step-by-step reasoning. We move, for example, from the proposition, ‘all men are mortal’ and ‘I am a man’ to ‘therefore I am mortal.’ Whereas angels just see the whole truth of the matter all at once; that is to say, they see all the individual applications of the general principle in the general principle instead of taking time to reason it out." And so when angels do communicate with us, they usually do it by suggesting things to our imagination.
Now "faith comes from hearing" (Rom 10:17) as St. Paul tells us. But the interior enlightenment we need to help us make sense out of what we have heard comes from the angels. The angels, then act like amplifiers or hearing aids to help us hear what God is trying to tell us — not only through the Scriptures — but also throughout the events of daily life. For it is through angelic communications that we learn how to discern what God’s will is for us. We feel, for example, an interior pressure of impulse or tension that suggests we should do a certain thing at a certain time. Often it comes out of nowhere and is unexplainable. We simply feel we have to call someone or go somewhere or check something.
"How many times have we heard the phrase ‘something told me not to’ or have said it to ourselves? How often have we narrowly missed being involved in a traffic accident or dangerous situation? How many times, when we were thoroughly lost, did we find our way? All of us have had an experience that seemed to have been unusual and which we could not explain. We have to ask ourselves, then, could it have been a warning, an inspiration, a holy thought, a comforting thought, a direction, a remembrance given by our angel?"
The ninth step, which is closely connected to the practice of silence and solitude, is walking in the presence of God. St. Cyprian tells us: "As we do battle and fight in the contest of faith, God, his angels and Christ himself watch us. How exalted is the glory, therefore, how great the joy (that should be ours) of engaging in a contest with God presiding and of receiving a crown with Christ as judge."
We must constantly keep in mind, then, that all our actions are observed by our guardian angel. He is there by our side at every minute of the day and night. "The more we learn, therefore, to think about him and pray to him, the more easily he can accompany us. For he will then become not only our true companion and confidant, but also he will become our best friend and counselor. Gradually our whole life will become so transformed by this practice that we will no longer be able to imagine how life would be possible without his presence."
Now, it is important to be aware that a person does not have to be physically or even visibly present in order to be ‘present’ for us. For presence is more than just a matter of physical proximity. For example, if a husband truly loves his wife, she will be present to him no matter where she is, even if it is a thousand miles away, or even if she should happen to die. On the other hand, if his love for her grows cold, then she will not really be present to him, even if she is standing or sitting nearby. We must always bear in mind, then, that the angels are intensely interested in every aspect of our life. For we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and men alike" as St. Paul tells us (1 Cor 4:9).
Obedience is the tenth step. The angels should be our role models in obedience. In fact, Pope St. Pius V stresses that "our obedience to the will of God should be regulated according to the rule observed by the angels in heaven." That is to say we should obey as cheerfully and as joyfully as they do. And St. Thomas Aquinas goes so far as to state that Christ himself presented the angels to be our models in holy obedience when he taught us to say the words "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" in the Our Father.
Fidelity is the eleventh step. The angels want us to be faithful to our state of life, faithful to our daily duties and above all faithful to the Church. For they were faithful to God during their trial in heaven. Our faithfulness to the graces, they bring us, then, will determine the degree to which they can help us. In other words, the more faithful we are to their inspirations and the more we cooperate with grace, the greater the influence they will have in our lives. For God conditions all his graces upon our cooperation with the angels. And so if God gives us grace ‘A’ we must cooperate with it by responding to the inspirations of our angel in order to receive grace ‘B’.
Humility is the twelfth step. Humility is the foundation of all the virtues. For humility is the truth. We must be humble enough to recognize our weaknesses and limitations and understand that we cannot do any good action without the help of the angels. By ourselves all we can do is sin. For as St. Thomas Aquinas stresses: "Man can of his own accord fall into sin; but he cannot advance in merit without the divine help, which is given to him by the ministry of the angels. The angels take part in all our good works" (cf. CCC 350).
III. CONCLUSION
A twelve-step approach, then, can be used to develop a closer relationship with our guardian angel and a deeper spiritual life. It must always be borne in mind, however, that the goal of all devotions is Christ himself and the doing of God’s will. The angels one desire, therefore, is to lead us to Christ. For Christ, as the Catechism stresses, is "the center of the angelic world and he has made them the messengers of his saving plan" (CCC 331).
Let us ask the Blessed Mother, then, the Queen of the Angels, to guide our footsteps into the ways of peace, so that we will safely reach our heavenly homeland with the help of our angel.
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© 2008 Order of the Holy Cross