"With Angels and Archangels"

The Risen Christ tells us that there are two sorts of Christians: those who have seen and believe and those who have not seen and yet believe:

I am a member of this less exalted, former group. People who know my story well say, "You cannot say that you have faith. You have simply responded to what you have seen and heard and know to be true." I do not dispute this.

All gifts from God reside in and derive from nearness to God. After all, God is always blessing. He is the life-giver. Those who choose worldliness instead of godliness (and you cannot have both) have, by that choice, distanced themselves from His life-giving Presence. You see it's our choice. Alternatively, those who receive this love in constant thankfulness have entered the intimacy known by children with their parents. Isn't this what our relationship with God is like — this constant gift of being provided for and loved, this never-ending round of blessing and thanksgiving?

In coming into intimacy with God, yes, we are blessed, constantly blessed. Yet, in loving Him we are also in pain as the child of a persecuted or betrayed parent would be in pain. But God is much more than an earthly parent, for His love goes out to all of His children living on the Earth. And in this there is much additional pain. Do you know the pain of the destructive son or thee insolent daughter who robs the entire family of joy? It never ends. Yet, the pain God experiences rises far above this, incommensurably so. And He does so suffering loss yet enduring all in patience and attentive love — the posture of suffering compassion we see in the person of the Prodigal Son's father.

What does this mean for us, the children who love God? It means that we are in the company of angels who see this suffering love poured out, who know the hearts of humans as no mortal creature could, and who, by these facts, invite us into a share of God's sufferings in their company. All of this comes about through devotion seen through the clear eyes of honesty. And I ask you: which eyes see more clearly and honestly than an angels?

By contrast, the attitude of the agnostic — "Maybe there's a God, but maybe not" — produces indifference, a dull haze in which nothing is felt with immediacy. But to see God, to love God with all ones heart, soul, and mind, must always mean that the scales fall off of your eyes. This is the first thing that happens. Ask St. Paul.

Jesus emphasizes this repeatedly to His Disciples: closeness to Him, Who is Life itself, together with deepening conversion, will mean that they will eyes that to see and ears that hear. For in loving God, our own heart becomes His heart, our own ways become His ways, and the world we see is the world He sees .... at least in some humble measure.

As He enjoins us to love our neighbor, we share one special part of His heart in blistering clarity: every day we must behold all around us the en masse destruction of precious human lives, now and eternally. The heart of the Lord Jesus aches seeing this solemn progress toward Eternal Death.

As we considered last Sunday, His very first words of ministry were (in effect),

.... the very same words spoken by His Forerunner, John the Baptist (Mk 1:15).

These words, spoken by the Son of God and the Prophet of whom Jesus said, "None born of woman was greater," continue to be the great crossroads of life. We today stand at this crossroads as constant witnesses to a vast and destructive delusion rendering, by comparison, all the holocausts of history as nothing: the rejection of God .... even rejection of the existence of all things noetic or spiritual and the willing embrace of self-annihilation.

The willful rejection of God gathered substantial steam with the advent of Darwin's theory of evolution (1859), not so much because the manner of human creation was contested, but something far more destructive than that: the impression that Darwin "had got rid of God" (as Thomas Huxley put it). Suddenly, people whose thoughts were always drifting to the world and the flesh saw a clear path to getting rid of God's morality, too. That is, in discarding the existence of spiritual life, people perceived a liberty to pursue the all-body life.

This ideal had already been enshrined in the eighteenth century with the gutting of Notre Dame Cathedral, the exaltation of human reason, and the atheist Thomas Jefferson's words, "liberty and the pursuit of happiness" .... which sound very difference in a world in which God is banished.

Pushing God out of the picture in 1859 opened the gates to all-body life as never before — feasting but never fasting, creature comforts but never the Creator, even preying upon others but never praying to God. And it did not take long for landmarks like Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals (1887) to appear explaining away morality as a fiction invented by the weak to protect them from the strong.

In the midst of all this bodily reveling, holy vocation would appear with its call to meaningful life. (For which holy vocation is deeper than becoming a mother or father?) But this unwelcome intrusion of the sacred into all-body life would also be opposed with vigor as a general demand went up for modern technologies effecting abortions. After all, once the soul has been dispatched what exactly is the value of life? So great was this demand that the landmark Comstock Law (1873) was passed in the United States forbidding abortifacients and related technology. Notices for procuring the same were also censored.

Rationalism, Darwin, Nietzsche, the mass murder of our own children — here certainly are visible milestones in the culture of death. Yet, they are nothing when set beside the scale, scope, and consequence of the invisible milestones.

Consider the marvel of a human life. Each at conception is endowed with a soul. Experiments have shown that an unborn child at sixteen weeks already has favorite songs if his or her parents will offer the gift of singing or music. Each is born innocent and good (as the Orthodox Church teaches). And each receives the lifelong gift of a Guardian Angel. This is life as God continues to plan it. Shall we adjust Jefferson's words slightly: "life, the liberty to enter Divine life, and eternal happiness."

How tragic to see God's hopes dashed with the rejection of all! Our bright and most intimate friend is to follow us down all the years .... ignored, and worse. Think of the unredeemed lives the Guardian Angels must follow. They are irretrievably present to "secret" moments .... that are anything but secret as a most sensitive and most holy intelligence is present to all. Truly, the friendship of Heaven, the greatest of earthly gifts (Jesus tells us), is received with no greater scruple or care than is rendered the dirty laundry. Breathtaking.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and spiritual nature even more so. Where angels are pushed out — and the holy can never dwell with intimacy within the unholy — that same real estate is instantly claimed by demons. That is the nature of spiritual life. The Church teaches that the spiritual life is not a "little-by-little" thing. It is on or off, hot or cold, you are in or you are out. Anyone who has fallen in love (that Divine property of human life) can tell you that that much! Either you are in love, or you are out of love. It follows that there exist no agnostic angels. Angels either love God incommensurably (for those are true love's ways), or they do not love God at all.

As an aside, do you know what we call the indwelling of an angel who does not love God? It is called demon possession. For fallen angels are quite comfortable with the all-body life.

We know the attitudes of all-body life. Indifference and prideful superiority is their element. A soul filled with their influences begins like an "Olympic judge" scoring those who would speak for God (usually giving low scores). And it ends with the habit of blaming God for everything that is wrong with the world forgetting that God left the world to us (Ps 115:16).

Once we have dismissed spiritual life, a deadly calculus comes to rule all. For once God and His angels have been exiled from the world, the stones of logic build a world of cold, impassive tombs. What is the world in which the spirit or soul is not permitted a place at the table? That is the world in which we live.

On another personal note, God has granted me a special perspective in this matter. For it turns out that I am a clone. I was created biologically through a bit of someone else's DNA. All of my life I have been that someone else to some degree: I walk like him; I talk like him; I have the same physical dimensions. At school I was called "twinny" (because people hate being wrong all the time). I was in my late twenties before I stopped turning around whenever someone called his name. We shared everything: wardrobe, birthdays, Christmas gifts (for we always received the same things), and friends. We sent to the same schools and shared the bedroom at times. That is, I had his nature (his genes) and his nurture (his environmental influences).

By the canons of science, I should be him in every meaningful way, for I am made of those three canonical components: nurture, nature, and the random growth of cells, which by comparison is not so influential.

But, you see, I am a clone. And this affords me a certain clarity. I see that these three canonical determinants of the human person are not the primary deciders. The great determinant of who we are and what we are is the noetic self: the soul.

Now, I do not claim anything special for my soul (twins never indulge in comparisons!) .... only that it is mine. All my life I have seen up-close that the push-and-pull between nurture and nature, while impressive, are subject at all times to the power of the soul, which is sovereign. It is king over every other aspect of our inner beings and over our outer actions. Do you know these words: yes and no.

What world is left us, then, when the soul is debarred from all debate in the public square? Consider: the major factor is not permitted in the conversation. You have heard the proverb: if you ask the wrong questions you will always get the wrong answers.

Where are we, then, when God has been shut out, distanced, and (to quote Nietzsche) "dead." You see, this is a rigged game coming to to all the wrong conclusions and leading to all the wrong consequences, and, yes, rendering a life devoid of all that is bright and good and life-giving.

The Western saint, Catherine of Siena, said that "It is nothing but Heaven all the way to Heaven" disclosing the unsurprising information that we must become heavenly (like the Sisters) in order to have a part in the Kingdom of Heaven. Does not our own experience attest this truth? The premise of a "foretaste of the Kingdom" falls naturally on our ears. After all, our faith is about constant transformation, a becoming that never ends. The highest goal is the all-important maturity wherein we become a creature perfectly balanced in soul and body .... after the Image of the Creator of everything, the God-man, Jesus Christ.

Today we celebrate the Bodiless Powers of Heaven. Together with God and all of us, they are the only creatures in the universe possessing spiritual nature, intelligence, and free will. The angels do not have bodies, and, by tradition, were not created after the pattern of body and nous, which is unique to the God-man and to the creatures He made in His Image, which is us. This helps us to grasp their spiritual state which is either "all in" or "all out." There is no neutral or middle position for an angel.

Sacred Tradition also teaches of ranks of angels — originally ten but then nine after the War in Heaven. In particular, we venerate with special intention today the eight archangels:

The of feast St. Michael and All Angels was instituted in early November (the ninth month when the new year began in March) to emphasize the nine angelic ranks.

The only source for this hierarchical information is The Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth or sixty century) (not to be confused with Dionysius the Areopagite (first century), whose relics we venerate here at the Hermitage). We must be cautious here, for Pseudo-Dionysius was deeply committed to Greek philosophy. We see his devotion to hierarchies found in Aristotle, a devotion practiced by the Dominican monk Thomas Aquinas much later further inuring the Roman Church to the structures of rationalism. But the Divine things open around us are really not subject to human hierarchy. They are mysteries, and we must reverence them as ineffable and immeasurable experiences of the Divine. St. Paul writes of

But he takes care to say no more than that.

We do not depreciate Pseudo-Dionysius, but rather place him in our heritage. After all, he enjoyed prestige with the Fathers and continues to be read and venerated down to our own time.

What is life without spiritual illumination? It is dingy, gritty, and finally diseased-unto-death. It is the unerring end of the all-body life. It is the long (and bitter) foretaste of the dark kingdom among the angels who hate God. This is the two-fold nature of angels in practice: the light of Heaven or the darkness of pride.

We too stand at this crossroads, but we are different. We may choose, then unchoose; commit, then uncommit; accept, then reject .... until our lives have reached the end when all choices freeze. Perhaps this is why people say "my whole life passed before me" at the point of death, that is, near death. For here at death's door is a last moment before all choices end. (We add a cautionary note: complete conversion, root and branch, in split seconds following a lifetime of rejecting God is rare.)

Our Lord in His incommensurable love and wisdom placed before us brilliant ministers of light. They are endowed with the powers of guidance though they do not know the experience of our bodies. (Though we might easily imagine what they think as they watch us choose garbage over God.) The world speaks loudly to our bodily desires drowning out all else. We must surmise, then, that we live during a period of unprecedented angelic activity. A vast battle rages all round us, the prize for which is ourselves. Our souls thirst for the still waters to which angels guide us, yet we are drawn to unwholesome stimulations of our carnal minds and the fading pleasures of our bodies.

The angels reverence us. Each of us is made in the Image of the God-man. They do not rise to the fullness of the human creature. They see that, mysteriously, this unrivaled gift belongs to the marvelous human Whom God loves so completely and well .... again, a mystery.

Each of us has been granted this reverential and most intimate companion. As Jesus has taught us concerning children:

Let us take care, then, not to despise these bright ministers of light and spiritual illumination. Especially, on this day, speak to your Guardian Angel. Consult your Guardian Angel in all matters. Pray to your Guardian Angel as a most powerful intercessor. When you rise in the morning, greet this most-loving friend. And when you lay your head down at night, say, "Till morning, St. Friend!"

.... in the loving arms of this most trusted companion, friend, and guide.  For who on earth knows better?

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.