Latest / Omnia Christus / 9/29/26 Tolkienian Angelology

Transcript

9/29/26 Tolkienian Angelology · Omnia Christus

0:00
SPEAKER_00: So today we have a strange celebration because it's not a feast day of saints in
0:05
SPEAKER_00: the usual sense, right?
0:07
SPEAKER_00: Because it's the feast day of saints, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Archangels.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: So obviously those aren't saints like we usually have.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: Those aren't people who lived holy lives who we ask for their intercession.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: These are saints.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: Spirits of God, we don't know much about the angels except that they are.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: Saint means holy one,
0:32
SPEAKER_00: you know, so obviously the angels are holy, sanctus, holy ones, so they're holy.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: And angel means messenger, angelos, someone who's sent.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: So, I mean,
0:44
SPEAKER_00: you have in the New Testament when it talks about,
0:47
SPEAKER_00: you know, the messengers that say angels.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: Right?
0:50
SPEAKER_00: Messenger and angel is interchangeable.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: For us now, we have this word angel, but for them, they're saying messengers.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: They're the messengers of God.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: They're spiritual messengers.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: They're not the normal messengers, but they're messengers.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: So we don't know what angels are.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: There's a quote that I like,
1:06
SPEAKER_00: might be a little bit convoluted,
1:07
SPEAKER_00: but I'll read it anyway, and then we'll talk about that a little bit.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: But J.R.R.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: Tolkien,
1:13
SPEAKER_00: some of you may have heard of the Lord of the Rings,
1:16
SPEAKER_00: but you may not know that Tolkien was also a very fervent and devout Catholic
1:22
SPEAKER_00: and was one of the principal translators of the Jerusalem Bible,
1:25
SPEAKER_00: for instance, and had a very rich faith life.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: And so from his letters, he has a little meditation on the angels.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of an imaginative meditation.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: He says,
1:35
SPEAKER_00: I perceived or thought of the light of God and in it suspended one small mote,
1:41
SPEAKER_00: mote like a little beam,
1:43
SPEAKER_00: or millions of motes,
1:44
SPEAKER_00: to only one of which was my small mind directed,
1:48
SPEAKER_00: glittering white because of the individual ray from the light which both held
1:53
SPEAKER_00: and lit it.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: And the ray was the guardian angel of the mote,
1:56
SPEAKER_00: not a thing interposed between God and the creature,
1:59
SPEAKER_00: but God's very attention itself personalized.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: This is a finite parallel to the infinite.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: As the love of the Father and the Son who are infinite and equal is a person,
2:10
SPEAKER_00: So the love and attention of the light to the mote is a person that is both with us
2:15
SPEAKER_00: and in heaven, finite but divine, that is angelic.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: And so again,
2:20
SPEAKER_00: like I say,
2:21
SPEAKER_00: it might not be totally clear what he's talking about,
2:24
SPEAKER_00: but he's saying basically that Our guardian angel might be God's love for us, right?
2:33
SPEAKER_00: That God's love for us isn't just something outside himself.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: Everything that God is, is personal.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: And everything that he does is personal.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: And so there's sort of this image of the Trinity that the love between the Father
2:44
SPEAKER_00: and the Son is the Holy Spirit.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: That that love is a person.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: And he says God's love for us too is personal,
2:52
SPEAKER_00: not just in the sense of being his personal love,
2:55
SPEAKER_00: But so personal that that love itself is a person, is a being.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: And that being is our guardian angel, right?
3:03
SPEAKER_00: That God's love itself is personal, is active, is real, is even a being outside of God.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: And that's not really foreign to the older way of thinking that all of our ancestors had.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: And we have lost because we live in this mechanistic,
3:22
SPEAKER_00: materialistic world that we've inherited from Basically the industrial revolution,
3:27
SPEAKER_00: it's only been the last 200 years that we see the world as a machine,
3:30
SPEAKER_00: as a dead machine that's just running along and we see everything in terms
3:33
SPEAKER_00: of mechanical processes.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: And our ancestors saw the world as a magical place in which everything was alive.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: Everything had life,
3:41
SPEAKER_00: everything had spirits,
3:42
SPEAKER_00: everything had a personality and they saw that love and being of God As manifested
3:50
SPEAKER_00: in all of these things around us.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: As living in them.
3:52
SPEAKER_00: As shining through them.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: And that's the angelic.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: Those are the angels.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: Those are these spirits that are around us.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: They really are all around us.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: And they're all throughout all of this creation that we see.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: And I think we sense their presence as we go.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: As we sense that when you look at the beauty of the sunset or the beauty of
4:13
SPEAKER_00: the trees or forests, it's like...
4:15
SPEAKER_00: There's something more here.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: There's something personal here.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: I feel almost a personal love, presence, connection.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: That's because God's love for things and the way God does things,
4:25
SPEAKER_00: it's alive and it's filled with life.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: And God's messages are alive.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: God's messages are his messengers who come and who give that message.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: And those are the angels that we see in the Bible where these messages actually have a being.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: And the more important the message, the more important that being.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: And these are the archangels who Who come to deliver the principal messages
4:47
SPEAKER_00: of salvation and are seen as sort of these guiding spirits over Israel.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: It's all the love of God.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: It's all God.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: But God, he is the least selfish person that there is, if you could say it that way.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: God wants to share God.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: He wants each one of us to be a messenger of His.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: And He wants all of creation to be.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: So all of creation is filled with these messengers.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: They're all around us.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: They're helping, guiding, watching over.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: And we can even sense their presence.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: We know that they're there even though we don't see them.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: So why do we celebrate them today?
5:23
SPEAKER_00: Why do we celebrate these messengers of God, these angels?
5:27
SPEAKER_00: Certainly not because they need it.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: They don't need it.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: They live to glorify God, but because they model for us what we're supposed to do.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: We also are supposed to be angels.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: We are supposed to be messengers of God.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: We're supposed to be communicators of his presence as we experience him.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Around us, we also should communicate that experience to others.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: That's a challenge.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we don't feel like it.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes we don't act like it, but that's what we're called to.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: We're called to be that.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: And we can, we can be angels in the lives of those around us.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: We can communicate God's presence to them.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: We can communicate his love, his being.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: So let us ask his angels who surround us.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: Who shed light on us,
6:12
SPEAKER_00: whose presence we sense to bring us into his presence and to help that presence
6:19
SPEAKER_00: to work through us, to shine through us into the lives of all of those around us.