11/12/2022 0 Comments Guardian angel home healthPerhaps one reason for the failure of some in the contemporary Church to talk about angels is their failure to talk about devils. Paul was clear: “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). Although it seems contemporary theology fails to say much about the reality of spiritual conflict and struggle, St. There are also angels - devils - that want us not to be saved. There are angels, including our guardian angels, to help us on the way to salvation. Our salvation is not achieved in the middle of some neutral playing field. Salvation is a drama because we can fail. Our salvation is not something we can achieve automatically, on cruise control. But we have to add one more element to this picture: the struggle against evil. So God, in his Providence, gives us constant support. He is deeply interested in our salvation. Our guardian angel is one of those angels who was tested at the beginning of creation and remained loyal to God. Catholic theology teaches that God also supports each and every one of us with an angelic person, a personal guardian angel. “We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), not as passive spectators to see whether or not we screw up, but to support us on our journey to join them.Īnd God, in his Providence, does not just leave us with the support of human persons. The Church in Heaven is on our side, rooting for us in prayer. The Church in Purgatory, which already understand just how precious salvation is, can pray for us even as they ask in reciprocity we pray for them. The Church on earth - our brothers and sisters - are supposed to help us to live the kinds of life God wants us to. And by “Church” I mean the Church in all its fullness: the Church on earth, the Church in Purgatory, and the Church in Heaven. Salvation is, after all, a community affair: we can be damned alone, but no one is saved except in community. God knows that and does not leave us in this world alone. If God did not sustain existence at every moment, the universe would collapse into nothingness, because no being except God IS. Creation was not a one-off act: God created and left. But neither did he leave us in this world alone, with “angels” maybe as an emergency clean-up crew.Įvery moment of our existence is sustained by God. He’s not a “helicopter parent” that shields us from the risks of skinned knees or skinned lives: he gave us freedom and expects us to use it with adult responsibility. Well, the good news of Catholicism is that people’s lives are not the results of fate or random chance, and that God is constantly involved in our lives. But, in a culture tinged by deism that pushes God off into the removed, uncommunicative, and maybe even unknowable, the Christian idea of Providence seems alien. At the same time, they know they are not in control, even if certain contemporary behaviors suggest they’ve failed to outgrow helicopter parenting to accept the risks of normal adult life. People deep down don’t want to think their lives are the results of random chance and quirks of faith. But like, with most errors, it’s not so much a totality of error as much as a kernel of truth seized upon to the forgetfulness or exclusion of all others. That quasi-secular angelology is off-track: it talk about angels but never directly about God and it turns angels into “heavenly helpers” to get people out of fixes but rarely if ever demands moral change of their behavior, especially in the name of the Living God. Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, interest in angels has made a contemporary comeback, albeit not so much in the Church as in “New Age” and “spirituality” circles. As noted in connection with the Feast of Sts.
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