Michaelmas

Angels, fairies, gods, and the recovery of wonder

Pillow by Houston artist, Camille Pendleton

Salley Vickers – noted novelist, Jungian analyst, and Classics scholar – writes in a recent essay that our perception of the world is losing a sense of wonder.  And since today is the Feast Day of St. Michael and All Angels, also known as Michaelmas, this might be a good occasion to revisit the mystery of unseen realities in daily life.

“We once inhabited a world that was animate, in which humans were creatures who not only perceived but were themselves perceived,” Vickers writes. “To live in this world meant to live among vital elements that were beyond our human control, that could not be corralled by human will, or predicted or captured by desire.”

The issue, she says, is not whether or not angels or fairies exist, but whether we are open to realities beyond, or deeper than, our knowledge and understanding.  Scientists now accept the concept of “quantum entanglement,” what Einstein once called “spooky action at a distance,” and we accept the reality of the Higgs Boson which is still beyond our perception. But what of angels?

After a talk I gave to a large audience years ago, a person asked, “Do you believe in angels?”  I said I did, to which a fellow priest harrumpfed, “I can’t believe in winged beings with haloes, like the ones in stained glass windows.”  I responded that I didn’t know about winged beings with haloes. 

But the idea of promptings from beyond, the sudden experience of awe or transcendence, mysterious messages and unexpected assurances, unseen promptings that warm the heart and strangely still the mind – I find the idea of angels being behind it all to be quite plausible, beautiful, and purposeful. Yes, I still believe.

Whatever form or appearance angels might have, if we were to see them, perhaps they represent, in Salley Vickers’ words, “states of intelligence beyond the ordinary order available to our circumscribed and culturally limited perception. A hidden layer, or layers, of the world responsive to us foolish mortals, that may react and respond surprisingly to us….” 

A life or a world dismissive of such hidden realities is surely a cold and lonely one.

The relevance to the contemplative prayer?  Thomas Keating puts it this way in the opening words of his classic work, Open Mind Open Heart:

“Contemplative prayer is the world in which God can do anything. To move into that realm is the greatest adventure. It is to be open to the Infinite and hence to infinite possibilities. Our private, self-made worlds come to an end; a new world appears within and around us and the impossible becomes an everyday experience. Yet the world that prayer reveals is barely noticeable in the ordinary course of events.”