This [a homily of St. Gregory the Great] makes me contemplate, among other things, our tendency to confer angelic status on those who have died. Jesus said that we will become as angels, not that we will be angels ourselves; if Saint Gregory is right, to be an angel is to be at once something far more and far less than a human being. As they, pure intelligences, have much that we don’t have, so also do we, being embodied, have much that they don’t.
We have, oddly enough — oddly, because it’s too easy not to think of it as a gift — the capacity for suffering. The angels, for all their brilliance and power, cannot enter into our sufferings, any more than they could enter into Christ’s on the Cross.
When we bear the Cross with the Lord, whether we take it upon ourselves, find it thrust upon us, or both, we meet Him in the power of His weakness, and the triumph of His humility.
Last night I read for the first time Regina Doman's spare and beautiful book, Angel in the Waters, in which a baby remembers his life in the womb. There, in the darkness and stillness and warmth, an angel gives him light and company and comfort. The story made both Crispina and me teary; in the most powerful moment, when the baby, now born, is mourning what he thinks is the loss of his angel, the angel whispers that not only is he still there, in the larger, brighter world outside the womb, but that when the time comes, he will lead the child in his care to a world outside this one, which is larger and brighter still.
The angels do live and move among us, though the light of this world seems to diminish their brightness, as a flashlight fades when you turn on a lamp. And what they are for, whether we see them or not, is the same thing the flashlight is for: to brighten the path, to show us where to set our feet, to keep us company and guard us through the night.
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