Last Sunday was the Feast of Michael and All Angels in our cathedral church (and I suspect in other places as well). Before I joined the Cathedral, these feast days had never entered my consciousness. Coming from my low evangelical/charismatic/pentecostal roots, it was frowned upon to make too much of saints and angels as it was seen as detracting from the person of Jesus. (I think it enhances it.) In fact, Jesus refers to theses beings as ‘his holy angels, without sin, able to look on the face of God the Father’ so it seems a pity not to let them figure in our worship.
Anyway, it was another chance at the Cathedral to enjoy ourselves. Mainly in the words and the music. It was such a smorgasbord of description, I thought we’d swallowed a thesaurus in the first hymn. We sang lustily about ‘seraphs and cherubim and dominions and princedom and powers and virtues and archangels and patriarchs and prophets and martyrs and saints.’ It was a veritable biblical potpourri of heavenly job descriptions. There are quite a lot of hymns about angels in our Anglican repertoire and we tanked our way through most of them in that service. Oh the joy of singing!
And we listened to readings about Jacob’s ladder reaching to heaven and the angels ascending and descending and another from Revelation about Michael (it was his day remember) fighting the dragon with all his angels, and then onto the Gospel and the awesome story about Jesus telling Nathanael that because he believed he would see the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.
It was all quite a lot to take in.
Angels can feel quite complicated sometimes because we don’t really know what they look like. We have our ideas, and we have artists through centuries who have tried to depict these other worldly creatures who live in heaven. So we make our best fist at understanding from what we do know and what we can make sense of.
And the preacher asked us in her sermon if we believed in angels. (Spoiler alert – she does).
It made me think of guardian angels – the sort of angel who stopped you running into the road when you were five or inadvertently hanging yourself when you were seven trying to be a trapeze artist in the circus. (Both yours truly). But my most intense experience of a guardian angel came ten years ago when we were hurtling down the motorway at 70 miles an hour. A twelve-wheeled articulated lorry drew alongside us on the inside lane, then without warning, pulled over. Apparently, he didn’t see us. (On his phone methinks). We were knocked across the road, spinning in front of him and if he hadn’t had the instant reaction to stamp on his brakes, we’d have been underneath his lorry. The car, still going at 70 carried on up the embankment, teetered at the top and then came rushing back down again towards the motorway and into the oncoming wall of traffic. My husband who was driving managed with remarkable control to grab the steering wheel, steer it back onto the hard shoulder and apply the brakes which by some miracle still worked. We escaped with whiplash and bruises and enough trauma to keep us going for the foreseeable. The car was written off but we weren’t. The police told us that day to buy a lottery ticket as it was our lucky day. ‘Not many walk away from that,’ they said. We didn’t need to We’d already won.
Last Sunday we prayed,
‘Grant that as your holy angels always serve you in heaven,
So, at your command,
They may help and defend us on earth.
I only know that when that lorry smashed into us, a curious calm descended. I laid my hands on the passenger window of the car and prayed to Jesus for help. And just maybe, he sent his angels to surround and protect us.
And if anyone asks me if I believe in angels then the answer is a very definite ‘Yes.’ I think they showed up on the on the A1 (M), going south at 10.30 am on the 14th April 2014.
Just in time.
Image by cocoparisienne
If you would like to read more musings on angels, here is a piece I wrote in 2020...
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