Some time this week, autumn truly arrived. There are many ways to determine that date, from the cosmological (the fall equinox!) and the meteorological (the first morning you wake up shivering) to the cultural (Labor Day! the start of school!) and, yes, the ecclesiastical: Michaelmas, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, which falls every year on September 29 and marks, in its own way, the arrival of fall.
People have wildly different feelings about angels. For some, the notion of a “guardian angel” who guides and protects each person has been a comfort throughout life. For others, angels seem like an old-fashioned superstition; as the Episcopal Church’s Lesser Feasts and Fasts puts it, the depiction of winged angels with swords and white robes “has led many to dismiss the angels as ‘just another mythical beast, like the unicorn, the griffin, or the sphinx.’”
The Biblical word “angel” (Hebrew malakh or Greek angelos, hence “angel”) means, simply, “messenger.” They sometimes show up to take care of a nation, they occasionally appear when God needs an invisible army riding chariots of fire, but they mostly simply show up when God has something to say.
One of the readings for Michaelmas tells the story of “Jacob’s ladder.” The great trickster Jacob lays down for the night in a holy place, and rests his head on one of the sacred stones. As he dreams, he envisions a great ladder, stretching from the earth up into the heavens: “and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” (Genesis 28:12)
Did you catch that? Angels were “ascending and descending” on it. Not “descending and ascending.” (This is the sort of thing preachers and pedants love.) The angels are not, as a matter of course, residents of heaven who only occasionally come to earth. They are on the earth, even now, bringing holy messages to us every day, climbing up to the heavens, and coming back again with even more to say. The journey begins and ends among us, with a constant stream of conversation with God—not just messages from God to us, but prayers from us to God.
Think what you will of angels in the literal sense. We do not live in a meaningless world from which God has absconded. Nor is our only access to God through occasional, direct encounters with God. Our “messengers” from God, our angels, are creatures too. They bear witness to God’s loving words throughout all creation. They are constantly among us, zooming to and fro before our very faces; if only we had the eyes to see them and the ears to hear.