Good Thing God is Outside Time

As I was heading out the door this morning I remembered that it was October.

So I took a second to flip the page on my freebie church calendar (you know the one: Renaissance reproductions of Jesus/Mary/Saints, little colored dots to tell you what vestments the priests are wearing, the saint of the day, and a dozen or so ads for funeral homes). There I discovered it was the feast of the Guardian Angels.

This struck me as quite relevant because I'd actually been reading up on the subject lately.

It struck me as even more relevant when I was NOT struck by the speeding car that appeared in my blind spot on the way to the airport. In honor of the guardian angels I decided to exercise my spiritual imagination in a particular way today.

Growing up, angels had always been around.

At least bearing bowls of holy water, passing notes to Mary on the stained glass, and so on. They were always a lovely symbolic motif, but not really essential. Maybe even a little distracting.

And one trip down the New Age aisle at the mega-bookstore and the whole angel thing got really weird really fast.

But, as usual the Truth is stranger than a I could have made up, yet makes perfect sense.

I'll let you get the details on your own, but some essentials are:

• Angels are real
  
• All angels have already been created (and there are more than we can ever count)
• They already know everything they ever will, and, unlike humans who can be forgiven, angels get ONE CHANCE to chose or reject God (and some do reject Him, I can think of one off the top of my head......)
• They are pure spirits, are not bound by matter, and therefore have control over matter
• (and this one is my favorite!) Out of love, God gives us an individual angel guardian at birth.

Which brings me back to the plane.

I decided to envision every person accompanied and protected by their own angel.

Now, of course I knew better that to imagine humanish creatures with wings or pudgy cheeks. But then everyone was just stuck with a sort of cloudy presence; a Cool-Whip dollop of the supernatural, more like Casper the ghost than a vigorous protector.

But when I tried to imagine the angels with more personality, I got stuck. Why did God pick a particular angel to guard a certain person? Did they share similar interests? Would someone who liked to praise God through song get a musical angel for example? Would the angels communicate with each other above their respective charges? And if we were all here on the same plane, where they working as a team to get us there safely, or was each more concerned with the individual state of the human soul?

And the more I thought about it, the more crowded it got in there.

And the more I saw the angels being active, the more I saw how everyone was completely ignoring them. This made me sad. After all, God gave all these special friends and no one could be bothered. And the sadder I got, the more outraged I got until I realized that I was so outraged that I hadn't bothered to chat with my own angel since the sigh of relief for not getting sideswiped.

By the grace of God, at that point I had to pour some drinks.

The rest of the day went fairly smoothly, and tonight we are here in Boston. It's a short night, but I was eager to blog a bit and do a little research to make sure I didn't accidentally post anything too heretical. In the process I confirmed what I had was in line with Church teaching..... except for the date.

Turns out today is the feast of St. Therese of Lisieux and that October 2 is the angels.

I guess this is just an example of humans getting a second chance.

Catch you in Phoenix tomorrow.