Wednesday, 10/2/13
Today we honor the Guardian Angels who play favorite roles
in our religious musings. We grew
up on the Guardian Angel night prayer. We have thousands of cherubs decorating
our cathedrals. Our obedient children and our beautiful girls are like angels.
But, unfortunately we are woefully ill-informed about angels.
This was a favorite day for us in the seminary, for every
year we were visited by Father Deggleman from Creighton University, and he
would delight us with stories about him and his Guardian Angel. His angel functioned as
his private secretary, taking part in all his good deeds.
I must admit that I have not kept up a similar devotion to
my Guardian Angel. Through the years I have been so earnest about retaining my
consciousness of being in God’s presence, that I have given no thought to my
angel being near.
The Bible, while referring to angels has never told us more
than that there are such things. A homily like this should stick to what is
factually true. So, let’s look at the facts.
Our Old Testament ancestors entered into real history around
the year 2200 B.C. when Abraham’s great-grandparents
moved up from the Arabian peninsula, settling in southern Iraq at the ancient
city of Ur.
Going back beyond them, hieroglyphics and cuneiform records
of ancient peoples bring us back another two thousand years. Then, reliable unwritten
records take us further back with the ancient peoples of Africa and the
Americas.
Now, if the theorizing of paleontologists is correct, most
of those ancient peoples believed that one or more gods created our world. They
go on then to understand that after creating our world, the gods found us so
wicked, that they abandoned creation, taking refuse far above the stars of heavens.
A big breakthrough in that ancient mythology came with
Jacob’s dream in Chapter Twenty-Eight of Genesis. While staying with the belief
that God kept himself hidden above the heavens, Jacob was let see streams of
messengers, with some of them carrying prayers up to God above the heavens, and
some of them bringing down answers to prayers. (The word angel is just Greek
for a messenger.)
Right down into New Testament times, people theorized that
God, never budging from his home above the stars, communicated with us through
angels. A big breakthrough came in
Acts, 17: 27-28. There we read Paul saying, “God is not far from any of us, for
in him we live, and move and have our being.”
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