Michaelmas is a season that is hard to let go of, which is why I’m returning to the subject of angels, or at least angelic matters. I think what fascinates me about angels is that they are impossible to describe. Artists and writers have tried to depict them, not always appropriately, in my view. Those rather fat discreetly draped cherubic beings, beloved of Renaissance artists, don’t always invite further engagement, whereas later, more subtly suggestive works do. Here, I’m thinking especially of the series ‘Angels in Combat’ by the Islamic artist Afruz Amighi and, in particular, of his painting entitled ‘Tent’. Perhaps I’m especially drawn to the ‘Tent’ painting because I’m also reading Sebastian Barry’s brilliant novel about the First World War A Long, Long Way to Go.
The painting and the novel present us with two very similar contexts in which we might expect to see or sense angels. Although Barry makes no explicit reference to them, we sense that only a very thin veil exists between the idea of angelic presence and that of a human being who is utterly compassionate and utterly wise, as well as supremely courageous. I am thinking of the regimental Catholic padre as he figures in Barry’s story.
The question that they present us with, in both the painting and the novel, concerns what angels actually do, what part they play in the bigger picture of the outworking of human destiny, so much of it being done through the bitter and brutal circumstances brought about by wars. But if angels have work to do, I do not think that it is limited to war situations, as if once treaties have been signed and the soldiers have gone home, the angels are also given orders to return to heaven, to put it in rather simplistic terms.
I think that angels, whose primary calling seems to be to mitigate the sufferings brought about by the stupidity of human beings, go on being present in their ‘warrior guardian’ capacity in life as we know it right now. The wars, and the chaos they bring, go on in many parts of the world. They also go on even when guns are not being overtly deployed.
Right now, a climate of chaos prevails in what we like to think of as the free world. There is a sense of things ‘falling apart’ to quote Yeats’s often used poem ‘The Second Coming’. The chaotic non-debate of two presidential contestants, one of whom is now seriously ill as a direct result of his own drastic failure as a leader in regard to this pandemic, feels to me like a kind of black hole into which democracy, and possibly civilisation as we know it, is in danger of being irretrievably drawn. We are on the brink of something cataclysmic which is hard to define, let alone understand.
There were moments during the First World War when soldiers felt this way about the appalling circumstances they were caught up in. They could not understand or make sense of them, of their own place and purpose in them, or even who they were fighting for. Something like this is happening to us now, existentially speaking.
We are all caught up in our own political vortex, driven largely by fear. So it is time to be calling on the angels, not in a passive way, as if to ask for help or divine intervention, to magic everything away. That is not enough and, in any case, the angels are already hard at work intervening where they can. What is required is that human beings of all political persuasions engage with them in this work, rather than wait in the vague hope that if angels exist they will somehow leap to our rescue before we either disintegrate as a civilized society or destroy ourselves with guns, both of which are in danger of happening given the situation in the US right now.
Angels expect us to work with them. We need to work with them, even if we don’t ‘believe’ in them. Believing in angels, or not believing in them, usually amounts to not being able to visualise them in any way. Scientists have provided a non-graphic portrayal of angels as akin to photons, which is helpful if nothing else has presented itself in a person’s spiritual journey. Plenty of people have seen or dreamed angels, so a discussion of what is meant by their ‘existence’ is superfluous, especially right now when we need their pure light (photon light, maybe), their pure energy, their pure intelligence (an idea possibly derived from the thinking of Aquinas) and their uninterrupted worship of God to be working with us into the chaotic vortex we may be about to experience.
How this is done will depend on the single hearted thinking of each person, by which I mean on the amount of energy we have to bring, in our thinking and willing for the good to prevail in our world. We then harness this will for what is truly good, because it is essentially of love, be it ever so slight, to the greater energy of the angels, those powerful forces of invisible light that surround us and that counteract every dark thought, every moment of despair, that overwhelm with their own brightness the smouldering embers of hatred burning quietly in all our hearts from time to time.
Once in this conceptual space, in our heads and hearts (even if it is only for a few seconds – it will grow exponentially, the more we occupy it) we can use words that come to mind, as we focus on the chaos, words like Kyrie eleison, eleison emas. Lord have mercy, have mercy on us and on our world.
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