Angels Ascending and Descending on the Son of Man

By the ministry of the angels and through the sacred humanity of our Lord, Christ brings about on earth what God wills in heaven.  This is what happened to the Virgin in Nazareth.  This is what happened in the agony of Gethsemane.

In the spiritual life, God sends super intelligent messengers from beyond the narrow confines of this visible world to help us take on the mind of Christ and to act in his power.  Angels ascend and descend on Christians just as on the humanity of Christ. Their words communicate deep things into our hearts unimaginably more expansive than are the limited horizon of thought open to merely human speech. St. John of the Cross says that their messages from heaven actually wound us with a deep ardent love of God that does not easily go away to change us, to help us find the only One who can satisfy our heart’s desire. There is nothing like love to free us from ourselves, from the prison of our own preoccupations.  Their ministry is to guide us out of our big fat egos so that we might find Christ and cleave to Him in faith.

One of the biggest obstacles to prayer is our bloated sense of self. It really is a problem of being full of oneself. A primordial hostility towards the true God lives in our hearts and compels us to seek and to fashion idols that appeal to our imaginations, that we seem to understand, that we think we can control. In our arrogance and ignorance, we easily convince ourselves that what we imagine God to be God is. When we do this we have made an idol out of the self because we have limited God to the product of our own fantasy. Whereas prayer should be a humble conversation with the Living God, when the ego is worshipped as an idol, prayer is reduced to an interior monologue in which we exhaust ourselves going round and round in circles - not unlike what is envisioned in various systems of reincarnation. Such prayer is nothing more than talking to oneself. It is fruitless self-occupation.
Here, self-preoccupation is a very consuming kind of worship. Preoccupied with our own concerns, experiences, thoughts, memories, fantasies, feelings, plans, ambitions, grudges, and desires; there is no interior silence for us to listen to God, to allow his silence to humble us in ours, to hear his creative voice so that it might produce a new work in us. The shell of our ego is so thick that it would have imprisoned us forever had not Christ pierced it by allowing himself to be pierced through by our sins.
Why does God send us angels?  God has desire to bless us with every spiritual blessing through Christ so that we might become the praise of his glory.  Angels help us realize this most high calling because their messages help us see the truth about God and about ourselves.  Through their ministry of which we are rarely directly aware, we see ever more deeply that the life of the Trinity, the inner life of God, is a constantly going out from "self" in an eternal ecstasy of unimaginably rapturous love: the immortal life of God is pure vulnerability, pure desire for union, pure benevolence for the other, pure self-surrender, pure reciprocity -- but in all of this a holiness, a wisdom, an inexhaustible incomprehensibility before which every created intellect must bow and the powers of all imagination must kneel.   By the hidden ministry of the angels, God desires that we, mere frail creatures though we are, share in this eternal life, his own life.  In the image and likeness of this unfathomable God, marred by sin but restored by Christ through his suffering and death, He constantly sends angels in secret ways to free us from ourselves and to lead us into a place where we can find Him to share his life with Him.  God's holy messengers - both angels and men - in speaking the truth to us, wound us with a love by which we see that we are only most fully ourselves when like the Living God we give the gift of ourselves in love.

Being Merciful and the Holy Spirit

The Gifts of the Holy Spirit are understood in many beautiful and wonderful ways. For example, the gift of counsel has been understood to identify a movement of heart that gives a knowing certitude about what to do in a difficult situation. St. Thomas Aquinas sees a relationship between this gift of counsel and the beatitude declared by Christ "Blessed are the merciful, they shall receive mercy" (see ST II-II, q.52, a.4) One of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer also comes to mind on this point, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." What is the relationship between the prompting of the Holy Spirit  and the blessedness realized in being merciful?


To say that someone is merciful (misericordia) indicates one's heart has been pierced by the plight of another. It is an intimate and personal moment which reaches for the restoration of dignity in the one who suffers.  It is a sharing in one's own heart the misery suffered by someone in some way entrusted to us.  To affirm the dignity of another, I need to be able to enter into that person's heart with something that will address the misery, that thirst for love.   Otherwise, my act of mercy can only be an external kindness which never really addresses the actual plight of the person God has brought to me at this moment.

Only the Lord has the power and authority to enter the heart of another.  He created the heart - each heart - and so He is the only one who knows the way.   He is the Living Water which alone quenches the soul that thirsts for love.   If He stands at the door and knocks, entering the heart is what He won the right to do by his death on the Cross.   He who is Pure Love vanquished the powers of death and hell, piercing the heart of humanity because He allowed us, our misery, to pierce Him.  In this way, He suffered the misery and meaninglessness of each of us on the Cross. Because He yearns that we be restored to our dignity and that we be free of such burdens, with this power He is always knocking, He is always seeking the lost sheep, always running off to meet his lost son no matter how far away, always trying to bandage the neighbor He finds beat up on the side of the road. And we who are joined to Him by faith and members of his mystical body are the instruments through whom He works for this great purpose.

The gift of counsel and being merciful intersect before the plight of the neighbor God entrusts to me. When the Lord brings us a neighbor who is suffering, He also sends us the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit prompts us with divine power and authority so that we might be an icon of Christ, so that the mystery of Christ might be extended to this suffering heart in this present moment, so that the Lord might deliver this particular loved one, neighbor, stranger or even enemy from the hell in which they are engulfed.

Indeed, the most dangerous of all moments is to stand before the suffering of another and to be paralyzed by our own indifference. It is a danger to our own humanity, a temptation to become inhumane. St. Thomas and other authoritative voices from our tradition seem to have understood that the Holy Spirit will not allow this to happen if we are open to his subtle movements in our hearts. Even when circumstances are so surprising and overwhelming that it is difficult to develop a good plan, the Holy Spirit gives us enough understanding and certitude about how to be merciful in such moments that we can act. With whatever effort we make, even if only feeble and reluctant, the power of Christ's salvific work not only opens up the possibility of being holy ourselves in ever new ways, but also gushes forth through us to refresh all those thirsting for living waters. How much more Christ can do when we act with the boldness of the sons and daughters of God!

The Gift of Intercession

In striving to love someone the way that person really deserves to be loved we often discover how important it is to turn to the Lord in prayer.  When our hearts are pierced by the plight of those we most love we find ourselves needing to pray. Spouses, sons and daughters, and parents all have needs which only the Lord himself can meet.  In fact, the more we strive to be faithful in loving those God has put in our lives, the more we see the limits and weaknesses of our own humanity.  It is an existential and personal experience of the human frailty.

This is why, when it comes to truly loving those God has put in our lives, we must constantly humble ourselves and ask the Lord to help us.  It is by beautiful paradox that the more we love someone we also see how much they suffer, and the more we see this, the more their plight moves us to humbly seek God on their behalf.  Sometimes their sufferings can even be difficult occasions of intense anxiety for us.  Yet in the face of such anxiety and heartache, prayer can easily become humble movement in the depths of the heart in love, for love and by love. This is the secret of the Cross.  When it comes to the demands of love and the poverty of our hearts, God is ready to provide if we are willing to ask and He always gives in excess of our openness and trust in his love.

To pray with hope out of one's own poverty before the painful misery of the beloved, this is the beginning of the priceless gift of intercession.  It is so rare, so beautiful, so human and so divine - all at once.  Such prayer only happens when the heartache of the one we love becomes our heartache too.   It is in this poverty of heart from which springs a prayer deeper than words, or thoughts, or feelings.  It is prayer in the core of our humanity, prayer from the center of our hearts.  The Holy Spirit produces this prayer.  This prayer cannot cease even in the face of the most intense anxiety and fear.  In this prayer, He is the bond which joins hearts together - a bond stronger than death.  In the power of the Holy Spirit, our frail cries to God are joined with the cries of the one we love and at the same time the Holy Spirit joins them to the cry of Christ Crucified - His last wordless cry which echoes forever as the triumphant hymn of heaven where He reigns risen forever.  Because of his great mercy and love, our heavenly Father never fails to answer such prayers.

This union of hearts in prayer is an entry way deep into the communion of saints -- these kinds of petitions and intercessions are what help bring God's mercy to bear on our misery.  On this point St. Dominic would encourage his friars that when they ran out of tears for their own sins they should begin to weep for the sins of others.  This heart to heart compassion when joined with prayer becomes a source of grace in the Body of Christ. When we let such deep compassion carry us into prayer we discover two things:

First, our trust in God is limited by the boundaries we impose on Him.  He is capable of infinitely more than anything for which we can ask or even imagine.   But something in us pulls back from this God who is not only capable of infinite love, but is eternal love Himself.  Indeed the One from whom we can ask anything might also ask anything in return.  And so we are afraid.  But voices from heaven constantly call to us, "Be not afraid!"

Second, the only way to make space in our lives for God to act, the only way to overcome our lack of trust, is by prayer.  God has permitted this moment in the life of this person He has given you to love because He is about a great purpose -- not only for the two of you, but for all those He loves.  He wants us to enter into a deeper friendship with each other and with Him - this is the whole purpose of his plan, of those things He has willed and those things He has permitted that His Will might be done.  Here, prayer is both the means and the end - because true prayer always ends in friendship with God.

Pope Benedict and the Question of 16th Century Christianity

Over at http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/ is Pope Benedict's address to the representatives from the Council of the Lutheran Church of Germany at the ancient Augustinian Monastery at Erfurt where Martin Luther studied theology.   The Holy Father's words include a great examination of conscience for anyone engaged in the task of theology, especially for those who know that prayer and theology must not be separate enterprises, who strive for a theology to help build up the Church.  He observes:


"Most people today, even Christians, set out from the presupposition that God is not fundamentally interested in our sins and virtues. He knows that we are all mere flesh. Insofar as people today believe in an afterlife and a divine judgement at all, nearly everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings. But are they really so small, our failings? Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage? Is it not laid waste through the power of drugs, which thrives on the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on the craving for pleasure of those who become addicted? Is the world not threatened by the growing readiness to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to religious motivation? Could hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if love for God and godly love of neighbour – of his creatures, of men and women – were more alive in us?  I could go on. No, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to place God at the centre of our lives, it could not be so powerful. The question: what is God’s position towards me, where do I stand before God?"


Pope Benedict's question which he attributes to Martin Luther, is a question of prayer, and this question was the driving question of the 16th Century -- not only among protestants, but also for Catholic saints and mystics like Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Philip Neri, and Catherine of Genoa - to name only a few.   We constantly find in the witness of 16th Century Christians how much they loved prayer.  They gave the highest priority to seeking and attending to the Lord for extended periods of time every day.  Prayer seems to have opened them to a deeper encounter with the Savior because through it they learned how much they needed salvation.  The Holy Father's reflections suggest it was in prayer that they opened their heart to the truth about sin in all it's horrific dimensions - great and small, malicious and petty.  These holy men and women also realized the price the Lord suffered to free them from this reality and in the Cross they also glimpsed the vast horizons of His unsurpassable love.  They clung by faith to the  Risen Lord, radically trusting that He is personally concerned about each of us in the most tender of ways.  They loved virtue and though they stove for it with all their strength, they always attributed any growth or development in it to the gracious goodness of God.  They loved the Word of God and those that could read were convinced that prayerful study of the Holy Bible provided an irreplaceable means of attending to the Lord.  Prayer, conversion and theology went together for them.  It is in things such as these that good Christians still hold so much in common.  Just as such friendship with God was a source for the renewal of the Church in the 16th Century there is little doubt that the restoration of the Church in our own time will be accomplished by a return to such radical and honest prayer: a prayer that imbues the way we live and the way we understand our faith.

Prayer out of the Depths

"Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.  Lord, hear my voice."  There are moments in the Christian life, moments when you least expect them, when you are severely tried.  There are times where we must perservere in love when everything most hoped for seems to evaporate while everything most feared explodes around us.  

When thrown into such a crisis, such a moment of judgment where the truth of the heart is exposed, there is no magic formula which can lessen the sting and no switch to reset everything back to "normal."  Such trials launch one out into new unexplored territory.   In such uncharted waters, many mistakes are made while many more undealt with transgressions are suddenly exposed.  Fear and anxiety must be constantly renounced.  It is time to trust - but in these moments trust costs so much.  Here, one is made lowly and discovers the depths of one's own poverty.  One sorrows.  One thirsts.  One hungers.  Prayer becomes a wordless cry, a naked clinging to the One who seems absent, a patiently kept vigil for the One whose coming is our only hope.  

In such dark nights, do not despair: the Holy Spirit in his great love for you has brought you to the threshold of the Father's glory.  You, soul that suffers all these things, you have been called blessed by our Crucified Master, and the meager confidence that you manage to place in Him will bear fruit that this present life cannot contain! You have entered an abyss of misery and the deeper abyss of God's mercy waits for you there.  It is in these depths, and only in these depths, that intimacy with God grows and the secret of love is entrusted to the soul.  For we cannot love except at our own expense.  We cannot progress to our goal but by means of the Cross.