A Reflection for the Feast of Sts. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, archangels
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
you will notice heaven opened
and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
In his iconic book The Catholic Imagination, Andrew Greeley memorably writes:
Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and spiritual medals, rosary beads and holy pictures…But these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we discover our homes and our world haunted by a way that the objects, events, and individuals of each day life are revelations of grace.
I believe being raised on this Catholic culture explains why I like mysticism a lot, and why I’ve reflexively written poetry when encountering something latest; I all the time feel drawn to those places where experience goes deeper than words and may only be expressed in images and metaphors. I like Dante’s Paradiso because of this—Dante is ceaselessly saying that what he saw there was too beautiful to explain—and I like the more poetic books of the Bible, like Revelations, which supplies an alternate first reading for today.
All of today’s readings—the 2 options for the primary reading, and the Gospel—detail mystical visions, which all the time have something to show us about God if we peer into them.
All of today’s readings—the 2 options for the primary reading, and the Gospel—detail mystical visions, which all the time have something to show us about God if we peer into them. Today’s first reading describes the Deuteronomy creator’s vision of the “Ancient One” taking his throne, and “1000’s upon 1000’s” ministering to him. At the top of the vision, “one like a son of man” approaches the Ancient One and is likewise served by “nations and peoples of each language.” Within the Gospel, Jesus tells Nathanael, “You will notice heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
I’m struck here by way of “ascending and descending on.” It might be a matter of prepositions being the toughest a part of language to translate consistently, but I believe the “on” here implies that the angels minister to Jesus not only by going as much as him, where he’s at a better place, but in addition going right down to him, where he sits in a lower place. Here, I believe, is the instance for us: If this mystical vision of the dominion of God is supposed to tell our work to make things “on earth as [they are] in heaven,” then we must always think each of serving a God who’s above us and who’s below us.
Often, we are able to concentrate on just certainly one of these: In a phenomenal cathedral, for instance, our eyes are drawn up. We get a way of God being “above” us. But perhaps just a few seats away in that cathedral, a homeless person is taking a nap. God is in that person, who all of our social conditioning tells us is “below” us. It’s easy to simply see one or the opposite of those as God. The challenge presented to us today is to see God in each, and serve God in each, ascending and descending.